I guess that's what might be the difficulty for newcomers: having an idea of what exactly I could use Emacs for that justifies the high upfront investment compared to other tools with a more familiar UI.
Doom Emacs and other distros are great because they allow to just dive in with minimal configuration effort and sensible defaults. Without it, I certainly wouldn't have started using org-mode.
It shouldn't be necessary to learn a programming language and spend hours with the Emacs documentation just to be able to use some of the great packages like org or magit.
> It shouldn't be necessary to learn a programming language and spend hours with the Emacs documentation just to be able to use some of the great packages like org or magit.
It isn't. You could just go through the included tutorial for Emacs, and watch a tutorial for org, and you'll immediately be productive in org.
And you definitely don't need to learn elisp. I was a power user for almost a decade before I learned elisp. The most I could do was use setq.
The point of my comment was that one can easily be productive in Emacs, but if you want to do things that set Emacs apart from other tools, you'll need to go further and read more docs. Someone could learn just the basics and write documents/code with Emacs fairly quickly. But those people will continually ask "What's the point - I could just use an IDE which follows semantics I'm used to."
Doom/Spacemacs are great - just not for everyone. It's good to have them around, and it's good to have better defaults in vanilla Emacs. However, there are a lot of config choices they made that I guarantee would have turned me away from them as a newbie.[1] They are a lot more opinionated than vanilla Emacs, and would likely turn off as many new users as they will attract.
But it's good to have more options.
[1] For one, I could never wrap my head around vi keybindings - and I tried them before I tried Emacs.
Doom Emacs and other distros are great because they allow to just dive in with minimal configuration effort and sensible defaults. Without it, I certainly wouldn't have started using org-mode.
It shouldn't be necessary to learn a programming language and spend hours with the Emacs documentation just to be able to use some of the great packages like org or magit.