Though it's made great improvements in recent years, GNU Emacs, the vanilla package, is more of an unrefined platform than a more finalized product that competitors like VSCode are.

SpaceEmacs is closer to such a refined product, though it's aimed at Vim users (with the 'evil' Vim-support package being front and foremost). I am not currently aware of a kind of "best-of-emacs" distribution that focuses on putting Emacs' strengths in their best light (likely at the cost of dropping some UI backwards-compatibility).

As an aside, the article [1] by Dan Coliascione (@quotemstr) from a few years ago about the effort required to work with Emacs' compatibility layers is insightful and hilarious. "GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype."

I honestly don't expect vanilla GNU Emacs to modernize its UI, because of its incredible legacy baggage. But I do look forward to new "distributions" that do so!

https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo...