I definitely fit into that second paragraph, and I appreciate you being careful to distinguish patience from being convinced of cost-benefit. I came to the conclusion after some pottering that it would be tough to make emacs nearly as good a python IDE as pycharm, not like a weekend's work it looked like a project in itself. It would again be a project in itself to make it as useful as jupyter for data-things. Someone has worked on embedding jupyter in emacs but it's a bit janky and you're then locked out from any extensions which will be written in javascript and expecting a DOM.

An investment in emacs seems to require a 10+ year time horizon, which means betting that it's going to grow and not decline, the numbers seem against that. I think what I really want is atom/light-table to get a lot better but the second died at birth and vscode is going to kill the first whilst having an uglier inner model that is less friendly to extensibility. I really wish Mr Granger had stuck with Light Table instead of running down a blind alley of VC money. There's a great quote that the threat to emacs is the browser, since it's a completely scriptable environment, I guess jupyter/light-table/atom embody that.

I still use spacemacs for running shells and editing files kind of ad-hoc.