That's quite the value judgement. Emacs, when compared with Atom and Sublime Text, has a tremendous learning curve for little payback. It's extensible? So are they, and with programming languages that are useful outside the editor, no less. It's powerful? So are they.

And more, they implement something resembling a common UI to the rest of the applications on your system. Sure, you can emulate that with the proper installation of modes into Emacs, but at that point you're already down the rabbit hole.

Emacs may still be the king of the hill, but it's a really nasty hill to climb. And with Atom and Sublime text sitting just a little below the summit with a nice, paved road to them it's going to take more than just being a bit better than them to justify that final hill climb.

So, no, people aren't afraid. Emacs is just not worth most people's time.

Sincerely, a VIM and emacs user.

Spacemacs, Prelude, and Scimacs are all good options depending on your use-case.

I mean if all you want is a text editor, some SCM integration, some build tool integration, syntax highlighting, and code completion then going with a specialized tool just for that is a good choice.

But the power of Emacs is that it can do nigh-anything and everything is a few lines of elisp away from being tightly integrated.

* Organize your tasks and projects with org-mode and work seemelessly with your team by syncing with org-trello.

* Use mu4e and magit integration to seemelessly send and apply patches and pull projects and todo items directly from email.

* Use one of the IRC clients or emacs-slack to do the same thing. Generate snippets on the fly in your team's chat from the currently selected text.

* Use org mode with org-babel and TRAMP to create interactive notebooks carrying out tricky tasks directly on the remote server from within emacs.

* Use emacsclient --tramp when you're SSH'd on a remote box to transparently edit in your local emacs.

* Replace tmux and tmuxinator with emacs-server.

I don't realy think it's small step up.

Org mode is one of the few unique bits of software available only on Emacs, but you can get 80% (if not more) of its functionality with markdown notes and regular email/calendaring software for 20% (if not less) of the learning curve.

EDIT: And I'm not ignoring Spacemacs and its kin. Yes, they are more user friendly, but they still do not follow many of the common OS UI models, and you still are interacting with a single-purpose programming language for any customization. The abstraction falls apart quickly when you try do do something more powerful (like opening the package manager).

Not to mention, the last three times I tried to do Go development in Spacemacs it would freeze in an infinite busy loop. It's unfortunate that a broken mode can completely hose the entire editor in this day.

Otoh, I tried both atom and vscode for the same job, but quickly ran away because using an editor on which modal editing is not a first class citizen is not for me anymore.

I disagree to this point. org-trello should work in that way "in theory", but actually it doesn't. Its usage is quite opinionated, and its syncing didn't work as I expected when I tried it out. Instead, we probably should have an org-mode integration with GitHub/GitLab issues.