I use ST because it just works.
    
    Let me tell you.. Atom will probably never come 
    close to Emacs programmability and extensibility. 
    Its by far the most beautiful software 
    environment. Its a living thing.

    In Emacs you're constantly reminded of the love of 
    generations of hackers in improving it. The 
    C-core-and-Lisp-scripting pattern was a perfect
    match. Emacs has the quality without a name.
    
    But Atom is modern. Emacs is single threaded (IIRC)
    and a single evil elisp snippet takes it to its knees.
    
    Those thousands of elisp mdoules (mostly) work together,
    without any kind of sandboxing. I think this is also
    notable and beautiful. It was achieved by a lot of 
    hackers who cared a lot.

This is MY little list of people who wrote emacs philosophy or code that I loved, off the top of my head:

    erik naggum (rip,  most people hated him, but he loved 
                 and understood lisp and I want back to old usenet
                 posts for insights many times 
                 those insights now lost somewhere)
    luke gorrie (slime originator iiuc, mind blown w/ his demos. 
                 also erlang guy and hacker at heart
    steve yegge (js2, explained emacs qwan in many posts)
    sacha chua
    TamasPatrovics (anything!)
    Eduardo Ochs (eev, built his own little world inside emacs)
    David O'Toole (linkd.el, many other intersting packages)
    rubikitch (!!! so many useful emacswiki snippets)
    alex schroeder (emacswiki master iirc)
    Matsushita Akihisa (moccur-edit.el, still miss this in Sublime)
    dr qubit
    Nikolaj Schumacher (beautiful auto completion packages)
    xahlee
    magnars sveen

Using emacs feels like being immersed in the rich culture of a past civilization.