This seems to be missing the elephant in the room - elisp doesn't suck, it is just a lisp. It is annoying having to learn a specific lisp just to edit Emacs, but whatever. Other lisps are better if you want to add lisp to your application.

The Emacs data model sucks. There are APIs that do who-knows-what combined with your personal extensions that modify behaviour who-knows-how, figuring out how to describe UI components is no fun, text editing is surprisingly hard from a programmers perspective, there are decades of accumulated different ways of doing things and it is unclear where to start or what has been obsoleted. The names made sense in the 70s but unfortunately it is 2024 and "Windows" means something different now. I wouldn't even exactly blame Emacs for any of this since some of it seems to be essential complexity of the domain.

EDIT Example, picked completely at random:

https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/tree/master/dev

    (defun cider-tramp-prefix (&optional buffer)
      "Use the filename for BUFFER to determine a tramp prefix.
    Defaults to the current buffer.  Return the tramp prefix, or nil
    if BUFFER is local."
      (let* ((buffer (or buffer (current-buffer)))
             (name (or (buffer-file-name buffer)
                       (with-current-buffer buffer
                         default-directory))))
        (when (tramp-tramp-file-p name)
          (with-parsed-tramp-file-name name v
            (with-no-warnings
              (cider-make-tramp-prefix v-method v-user v-host v-port))))))

Here is a random function from CIDER. The code is simple enough, the lisp is no problem. Immediately we see we're interacting from one extension to another, have to understand Emacs buffers, need to know how warnings are displayed, have to understand parsing as a domain, and appear to have a network involved. That is a lot of work to debug one function when something is misbehaving. Not an unreasonable situation, but nonetheless a barrier. Then on top of that I have to go look up what let* is and why it is presumably different from let. One more thing I don't want to do. Emacs lisp sucks.

EDITEDIT Tramp isn't an extension, it is part of core emacs. We live and learn.

EDITEDITEDIT Spoke too quickly, it looks like it is a GNU-supported extension. This is the sort of trivia that got me using Doom Emacs.