Emacs is the self-documenting editor for a reason. I always found the documentation very good. I submit that every sufficiently complex system will need some terminology specific to the system the user will have to learn. Not wanting to do so if a form of lazyness that the developers cant really do anything about.
I have many times submitted jobs related to helping solve protein folding from within Emacs (shell buffers). It helps a lot to have the editor operating on the shell inputs and outputs.
You really didn't get my point, did you? For new research, protein folding was a random example, you need new terminology which everyone just accepts and uses, it becomes standard.
Emacs sort of tried to do that, failed, and now it's like Australian animals faced with animals from the rest of the world. It will never win, it should adapt.
I think that Emacs solved a lot of important problems before others did. The rest of the world decided to reinvent and rename things, and they popularized some of these things. Emacs held its ground, so now people who transition to Emacs from a different background might be confused. Emacs documents everything thoroughly, so it might take a whole weekend of reading to catch up and be productive. I think that Emacs is worth this extra time. The real number of confusing terminologies or technologies are probably only a dozen or two. And then there are hundreds of common concepts with a powerful implementation in Emacs. And some things that you still can’t do as cleanly with other tools. Especially things you’d need in cutting edge research.
SInce you mentioned "unique" features, Emacs is the only programmable editor which works mostly the same in terminal and GUI mode. You can write extensions (in elisp) which largely dont know about the UI used by the user. So you actually can write UI-independent programs in elisp. I dont know a single tool that got this right. Sure, you're going to tell me that termianl isn't relevant these days, and everyone has moved onto windowing systems. Yes young padawan, that might feel true to you. You will understand one day.
