Your concerns are artificial! Let go of your concerns and be free. The hundreds of Emacs users around the world are already doing it. It's great.
It used to be a bit of a wild-west without lexical binding but we have that now and it's going over pretty well. Fewer libraries step on each others' toes as adoption spreads.
We have package management built-in. We have awesome introspection and debugging tools. There are a lot of wonderful built-in packages.
My init file isn't even written in raw elisp anymore. I use a well-documented org file. The amazing org-babel library is bundled in. My init file is written for humans to understand and only incidentally for my editor to execute. It's great.
I only wish more software was designed this way.
Came here to say that I do this, too: https://github.com/nhoffman/.emacs.d
Not sure if it was worth the effort, but it was fun!
http://sachachua.com/blog/2012/06/literate-programming-emacs...
Eclipse's uses XML to declare UI, behavior, expressions. Completely baffling. Terrible docs. Extremely difficult to debug. I was reduced to trial and error (after copying working examples I found).
I've used Eclipse since the early alphas. Its muscle memory.
Scouting the plugin dev stuff of IntelliJ, it doesn't appear to suck so mightily. I've forced myself to start using IntelliJ.
I miss LISP so much I could cry. Even so, I remain wary of metaprogramming. And I very much want to do plugin dev, vs modifying the runtime, for the separation of concerns. I've had to customize all-in-one runtimes and borking the whole runtime with a bad override is not fun to debug.
I've not done emacs plugins, so can't comment or compare.