Isn't the emacs core (excluding packages) known to be very stable? At least I've only had one crash in a year or so, most likely due to some package misbehaving.
I mean, I love Emacs and use it daily. But it certainly has plenty of bugs; but what reasonably complicated piece of software doesn't?
Having said that, the very core text editing engine, i.e., the part that's written in C and the basic Elisp editing functions around that are still rock solid as always, and for me this is still the ultimate model of what a text processing engine should be. It handles large files beautifully (and errors gracefully when it cannot), does file locking well, goes to great lengths to ensure the integrity of your file, all of that basic core stuff is just superb and well thought out, by a lot of brilliant people over a long time, and that's all very well optimized. I think the problem is that too many third-party extensions are included with the core release.
Before that there were years during which there was no way to configure Emacs that I was able to find to refrain from asking the user what coding system he wants to use every time a buffer containing a non-ascii character is saved. Not strictly a bug since maybe there are users who do not mind regularly getting into the same dialog with their text editor, but certainly, so many occurrences of the same monotonous dialog is unusual behavior in a user-facing application in this decade and very tedious at least to this particular user.
One reason Emacs is difficult to debug is because of the widespread use of global variables.
That said, I haven't found anything worth leaving Emacs for. (If I were a web dev, maybe I would've left it for vscode by now, but I don't like how text looks in vscode: I prefer the native OS X text rendering used by almost all text editors except the Electron-based ones.)
Exactly. Every so often I try to make a half-hearted effort to move to a more moderen editor, or even an IDE, but for all its flaws even nothing comes close to Emacs. Vim is pretty good, but tries to do too many things it's not supposed to; for vi-style editors I prefer Nvi.
Hey, I can dream.
On the other hand, I can't really think about a system that fulfills those conditions. But I wouldn't call anything "ultimate" if it doesn't :)