To be honest, ELisp is not bad. Not in the same range as VimScript. In fact, ELisp with this weird concept of I/O through buffers makes a lot of sense for a text editor and I find it quite an elegant concept (not always practical, though). And while ELisp is not really CL, the lacking parts are the interpreter and runtime themselves, not the language.
Writing elisp is not hard. What's hard is integrating all the modes, keymaps and quirky behavior of coupling all these smalls bits of code together. This is what makes emacs hard. Emacs, the "core editor" itself, is incredibly small. Way smaller than vim (build it by hand if you don't believe it). Emacs as the editor that you use every day is almost pure extensions.
There's a /whole lot/ of global state in an editor. This is not going to change with Python, Guile or any other language. Users that complain about ELisp, most of the time actually never tried to write ELisp at all (they just glue some elisp around in .emacsrc). That's fine, but they don't realize what's going on under the hood. The C/C++ mode in emacs is completely different to the "stupid" syntax highlighting in Vim or most other editors.
I normally recommend switching to another editor if after several years you still don't appreciate the difference. IMHO emacs, as it is, is a great editor. ELisp is part of the success (though guile would be a step forward).