Emacs has a lot of hurdles in front of it: niche extension language, huge volume of customization before it becomes usable for your average Notepad++/Sublime user, etc., why add confusing documentation and naming on top of it?
The cost is huge, but IMO it is worth paying. It is a one time cost (refactoring, updating the documentation and many/most extensions) which could open Emacs to a much larger audience.
I left text editors for a few years (buried in Eclipse) but came back recently for Haskell and Go, and the community is ON FIRE. So much good stuff now: Melpa, flycheck, magit.
PS: "Meta" is fine. There's no standard "Alt" key anyway. On Mac, meta is often the "option" key but not always. It helps that Emacs has it's own term when switching between Windows, Mac, VNC of either, terminal, etc.
And the window/frame term swap is only one of many such examples. So basically, you could make your own Emacs that uses modern terminology and is completely incompatible with all existing 3rd-party elisp code, and then you could try to convince people to switch to it. But would having two equivalent but fundamentally incompatible Emacs/elisp variants be beneficial to Emacs as a whole? I doubt it.