What I'd like to "condemn to obsolesence" is this tired narrative that insists that emacs needs to change to "get with the times." People were saying this when I starting using emacs in 2000, back when vi vs. emacs could still erupt into flame wars.
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.
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.