Hard agree that these are true ‘fundamental pitfalls’ of Emacs’ design. However I may go further on your third point. I would like to see a dedicated new user/learner mode that in addition to saner defaults would be pretty fully configured and pre-loaded with the most common extensions/plug-ins/etc. This could then lead to development of dedicated documentation/tutorials that assist the new user in becoming proficient in the common style/habits of Emacs usage.

This could provide a much simpler full featured ‘base’ state for the app, that can then be customized from that point or can be stripped back by removing the more common add-ons and customized from the ground up.

It would in some ways necessitate a strongly opinionated set of defaults and an additional focus on documentation, but I think in the long run the app would benefit from higher retention.