If you ask me, Emacs is fine as it is. In fact, I have been bitten by two changes over the time which come from the "better UI" camp. matching-paren-mode stopped to do the jumping cursor thing, which I totally rely on working with a braille display. I luckily caught this during the dev process and managed to submit a patch which adds a flag to force the "old" behaviour. And frankly, the guy who forced transient-mark mode on the world needs to hugs till he feels the pain. I am always bewildered when something I just marked suddenly vanishes just because I hit del. Move cursor a bit and DEL suddenly does something different again.
IOW, I am a long-time Emacs user, and really, stop breaking the world just because you think something needs to be "modernized". Breaking the user experience of long-term users in order to cater to newbies is rather rude to those who have invested considerable time to learn the system so they can use it as effectively as possible.