I don't particularly like Elisp as a lisp, but I still prefer it by miles to Vimscript which I find revolting. And I find that a lot of packages for using emacs for things like IRC, email etc tend to be quite buggy. If you spend some time on any Lisp/Emacs related IRC channel, you'll see a steady backround noise of people disconnecting due to ERC crashes. In addition, Emacs tends to have pretty hit or miss documentation outside of vanilla Emacs.

There's so much outdated crap floating around on sites like Emacswiki recommending a bunch of buggy, slow packages for things that have been added to vanilla Emacs years ago.

And in general I find that the more stuff I stuff into my Emacs config, the more weird interactions are possible between various packages and the more bloated and unmaintable it gets, breaking in all sorts of annoying ways when Emacs is updated.

So I try to keep Emacs limited to what it (IMO) does better than anything else: development and org-mode.

There's the saying that Emacs is a great OS, but a terrible editor. I think it's a terrible OS with a fantastic editor.