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If the Emacs keybindings and terminology could be mastered in not much more than 30 seconds, they wouldn't pose a problem in the first place.Try 5 minutes then :). No, I'm not joking with this, nor am I trying to be snarky. I've just seen the way people approach new tools, and I also know myself. Most of the time, people can barely give 30 second of serious effort before judging something as "okay" or "too complicated" - at least as long as they view the new thing as something they already know. "It's a text editor, I know text editors, I shouldn't need to learn anything new here".
Once you drop the assumption that you already know Emacs because you know the product category it's purportedly in, it turns out the conventions and keybindings aren't really that hard. The manual and the tutorial do a good job explaining them, and there's always CUA mode to be used as training wheels :).
(For me, the biggest hurdle I faced when learning Emacs was to unlearn using arrow keys for navigation - which really has nothing to do with Emacs per se; you need to do that for any editor in order to use it efficiently.)
As a point of comparison, imagine approaching Emacs like you'd approach Blender or 3DS Max. In my experience, there's less complaints about weird conventions there, because newcomers to 3D graphics don't assume they know the whole tooling space just because they tinkered in Sketchup in the past.
(And that's not to say Emacs isn't full of legacy cruft. It's just that the legacy cruft that's really holding it down is not the things newcomers complain about.)