The elisp concepts are good, but which things are windows and frames and buffers is just a bit esoteric now. And they are dogmatic in tone that you shouldn't be able to work without passing some sort of worthiness test.
I wouldn't say they're esoteric, but there is a learning curve because they're incongruent with the UI we've been taught by our graphical desktop environments. I do concede the somewhat dogmatic tone, but that's honestly just par for the course with any GNU software, though emacs is for sure one of the worst offenders. I still love it though, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone that isn't already expressing interest in giving it a try.