I'm with you. Making Vim look pretty involves adding ":color <whatever>" to your .vimrc. Making Emacs look pretty involves installing color-theme, hopefully compiling it so it doesn't take forever to load, editing your .emacs.d/init.el since you can't customize that via customize-apropos (AFAIK), and so on. Likewise, I'm with you that the default regex implementation is...surreal, at best. Having reb-re-syntax be 'string should be the default.
On the bright side, look at what we're discussing here: the default regex syntax and pretty colors. Compare that to about five years ago, when we'd be instead discussing how to compile Emacs in a way that had fricking TrueType font support. Emacs has come a long way.
Yeah, both 21 -> 22 and especially 22 -> 23 were vast improvements. Appearance issues aside however, emacs is starting to feel a little like windows in a way (uh oh downvotes ahoy), in that it's lumbered by backwards compatibility considerations. Emacs with namespaces + a nicer lisp would be... something very special.
They've added lexical scoping in trunk in a fully backwards-compatible way; it wouldn't be hard to do namespaces and a "nicer Lisp" (by which I'm assuming you mean Guile?) in a similar manner.
That said, the number of people who hate on Elisp is surprising to me. No, a hacked-up version of Maclisp is not the best Lisp in existence. But, seriously, you're competing against vimscript. Will even the most diehard Vim addict actually argue that vimscript is even comparable to Elisp?
I think even with the existing lisp it would be interesting to keep the interpreter and rewrite a lot of the basic elisp modules. Another Emacs "distribution" would be quite interesting...
On the bright side, look at what we're discussing here: the default regex syntax and pretty colors. Compare that to about five years ago, when we'd be instead discussing how to compile Emacs in a way that had fricking TrueType font support. Emacs has come a long way.