Well thats the thing with my table saw, its an extremely good Tool; ripping, cross cutting, router table, many different materials, coving cuts etc. etc. you call it! but its also extremely old and outdated tool.
I used my table saw for years and one day realized I had accumulated a lot of very detail knowledge of how to use it and spend lots of time maintaining it, thats when i was convined it was not the tool for me or I was using it wrong. I moved to a hand-held jigsaw, then a crosscut saw, and now im giving a handsaw a try.
As much as I liked my table saw, i dont see myself using it again soon.
The fundamental difference in your analogy is that the table saw is a single use tool optimized for precisely one thing. It requires little maintenance or training (compared to emacs, anyway) and has been optimized for this one thing so much that it's hard to imagine something that is faster, safer or more reliable.
The same cannot be said of Emacs. It is a general purpose tool on a rapidly evolving platform. Its C interpreter is starting to show its age, it requires some tinkering (and many outside tools) to interact with on mobile devices and as the world moves on it feels like it's trying to keep up with specialized tools. I'm an Emacs user, but I will also argue that the comparison with a table saw is not a fair one.
I used my table saw for years and one day realized I had accumulated a lot of very detail knowledge of how to use it and spend lots of time maintaining it, thats when i was convined it was not the tool for me or I was using it wrong. I moved to a hand-held jigsaw, then a crosscut saw, and now im giving a handsaw a try.
As much as I liked my table saw, i dont see myself using it again soon.