Whilst most of your points are subjective I can still give my side of the story as a long term emacs user and person of non-elite status.
"wrestling bad defaults": I use almost entirely default key bindings for 15 years and I find that they are very comfortable for navigating and editing text, almost like the defaults were carefully arrived at by users.
Personally I agree that for most languages you are better off using an IDE than Emacs, although I do use emacs full-time for Ruby as it has excellent support. Haskell, Clojure and Common Lisp are also great on Emacs. That said there are many more uses for a powerful text editor than for typing code.
Org mode is fantastic. I used it for all my personal note taking and for project management. It has a lot of depth but you don't have to go deep to take advantage of its simple tree structure editing mode. That said if you do go deep, things like Babel model and tables can be incredibly powerful. There are tools to read and even edit org files outside of Emacs but since Emacs itself is portable, org-mode is in fact portable.
That this is the top comment is just evidence that the elites are voting it up to try and keep the rest of the world from finding out that Emacs is the best