Ah yes, the good old "mouse? you're doing it wrong!" bit of elitism. Some people find keyboard navigation through a second buffer that pops up on the bottom to be not-good. I'm one of those people. I hate it when completion buffers, or anything related to a second buffer, pops up in my frame.

Google Chrome, or any modern browser for that matter, has a much better way of doing things. Imagine for a moment that I was browsing and editing code in Google Chrome instead. A symbol would be a link, and when I ctrl+clicked on it, it would open in a new frame. That would be an interface I could get behind.

For completion, it ought to work like the IDE I used back when I was writing Scala. A little tooltip would pop up with completions. You could scroll through them with the mouse or keyboard, and click or ENTER the one you want and it would paste in. Or you could ignore it completely and continue typing. This sort of UI is so much better than popping up a new buffer in the frame. But in Emacs UI, everything is a buffer and there are only three places they can (or usually do) go: in a new frame, in a new window, or in the minibuffer. Only that last one is usable.

GNU global is not a solution. It produces marginally better output than etags, but still requires you to actually run it whenever you make changes to the codebase. Or at least it did back when I tried it as an etags replacement.