I should have clarified...

>Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world.

I was really responding to this. You're right though: there are aspects of Emacs that are dated, the UI isn't very spiffy, and I've never dealt with elisp before so I'll take your--and everyone else's--word for that. I was just suggesting that it gets the job done for a lot of people and maybe, as a result, shouldn't be classified as outdated.