I'm genuinely puzzled about why posters like this want to make Emacs into some kind of household name if only it would do some random thing that they want.
I'm a die-hard Emacs fan, but it's a tool. It works well -- really well for a lot of us. For the rest, honestly, I don't care very much about evangelizing Emacs because I have a lot left to explore about using it first. There is 20- and 30- year old elisp out there that still runs perfectly well on a modern Emacs and probably solves some of your problems. Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter.
I agree about the docs being dense and somewhat unapproachable, a lot could be done towards making elisp easier to approach. I think a big problem here is the unapproachability of any Lisp (not just Emacs Lisp) as a scripting and configuration language. In fact, I wonder if (Clojure being the first), elisp is the second most popular scripted Lisp in existence.
> Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter.
Of course you do. This policy doesn't benefit you in the slightest, and since you are a macOS user already, all of your experience is telling you that this policy doesn't work.
But this particular policy is logical, and it doesn't really hurt Emacs. And, who knows, perhaps one day some talented/bored macOS developer will become so unhappy with Emacs not showing the latest fashion of emojis, they will go on and implement that support in Free libraries that are used for text rendering on GNU/Linux, and contribute it upstream.
I'm a die-hard Emacs fan, but it's a tool. It works well -- really well for a lot of us. For the rest, honestly, I don't care very much about evangelizing Emacs because I have a lot left to explore about using it first. There is 20- and 30- year old elisp out there that still runs perfectly well on a modern Emacs and probably solves some of your problems. Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter.
I agree about the docs being dense and somewhat unapproachable, a lot could be done towards making elisp easier to approach. I think a big problem here is the unapproachability of any Lisp (not just Emacs Lisp) as a scripting and configuration language. In fact, I wonder if (Clojure being the first), elisp is the second most popular scripted Lisp in existence.