Emacs OOTB sucks and some of the most useful packages will never be built-in, because developers don't want to deal with license assignment and locking themselves to the slow release cycle of Emacs. Also the community can be discouraging.
"Emacs OOTB sucks" People say that, and those people are entitled to their opinion. (A word of warning: I think many people who say that are not actual Emacs users.) I'll keep happily using vanilla Emacs while people complain about it, though.
Of course, I don't really use it OOTB, I mean, I do have a configuration. My 700 line init file installs some 20 third party packages from MELPA, and changes a lot of defaults. I've also written about 1200 more lines of Emacs Lisp distributed among some 25 tiny packages I use. But I did start with Emacs OOTB and never thought it sucked, I thought instead, over and over, that some minor aspect could do with some tweaking. :P
And not locking yourself to Emacs's slow release cycle is a perfectly valid reason for not wanting your packge to be built-in. I don't think there is anything wrong with the fact that many excellent third party packages will never be built-in.
Well, you're right, it's not so vanilla anymore. :)
But that has accumulated over the course of about 10 years, so its really not a lot. And the possibility of having everything just the way I like is what drew me to Emacs in the first place! A shorter config would be an indication that either (1) I happened to like everything exactly the way it was by default, or (2) annoyances can't actually be fixed. I don't think any software could fall into (1) (right?, there's always something you wish were slightly different, or something you want to automate) and Emacs, unlike most programs, does not fall into (2).
Also if you saw my configuration and compared it people who use Doom or Spacemacs, or even just Helm or Ivy, you'd think my Emacs is very vanilla.
