Don't get me wrong, I have grown to love emacs. I use it all day, every day, and a good portion of my hippocampus is dedicated to storing away emacs keyboard shortcuts. But why can't I have what is good about emacs (a ton of buffers, unlimited bash shells, keyboard based) in a native text editor?
I'm content with emacs now, but why do engineers have to spend so much time wrestling with an editor like emacs before being able to use it properly?
Did you see this discussion a few months ago on an interesting idea for a modern GUI terminal? I don't know if there has been any further development but that definitely has thought provoking ideas.
Emacs has hundreds of thousands of man-hours of development time put into building features for it. Throwing that away just because you want something prettier isn't worth it.
If you're on a Gnome-flavored Linux, then many "lesser" editors can use GVFS to remotely work on files.