Interesting project. Emacs is such a powerful tool. It makes sense to attempt to modernize it. It will be hard to get momentum because Emacs users are typically die-hard purists, so moving away from the "Emacs way" may ruffle some feathers.

Recently I've started to do this on a small scale in my own .emacs file. Shortcuts I use every few minutes were hidden but too many multi-step keyboard shortcuts. Especially when I really don't need to duplicate the arrow and page-up/down keys with single-step shortcuts.

It's too bad it sounds like there won't be a Linux version.