The core GNU Emacs is quite a bit less lines of Emacs Lisp.
Do you have any idea how many lines of elisp/c the core is? And how gnarly it is? I've read some stories.
IIRC Emacs' C code numbers ~300kloc and includes both bindings to low-level, systems and GUI functionality, some parts of standard Elisp library (writen in C for performance), as well as Elisp virtual machine, byte-compiler and so on. No JIT yet, but at least there's threading support (take that JS :P).
Starting from scratch has many advantages, but it doesn't really work with programs and systems large or complex enough. Otherwise we'd be using a fresh OS every five years instead of working on one of the 5-6 OSes which were all created 30+ years ago.