I use emacs from time to time, and I consider myself an advanced beginner. I have wrote 2 or 3 times a relatively extensive .emacs and sinked several hours each time playing with its configuration, searching for nifty things, reading other people's blog posts; played with org mode and used eww to geek out a little bit.

This is, in my opinion, the best way to introduce people to light .emacs configuration. To the point that I think there should be 4 or 5 different minimal .emacs such as this one in the main project page.

I understand why there is resistance to enhance the default UX and configuration, and I see the allure of spacemacs, doom, prelude, etc. But it is overkill, and pushes you down a configuration slippery slope that some enjoy too much and others dread, but that kills productivity.

> you learnt that it recommends Emacs and SLIME for development environment and it seemed like a significant additional learning curve for you?

This is the key. This is what pushes a lot of people away from emacs. Just have a "1 click" better default that also serves as a tutorial / example of how to cover 1 simple use case: one for common lisp, another one for clojure, a couple of different ones for python, one for writing a book. Just feed the space between no config and 3h of research. Have something to point out to newbies.