Well emacs last stable was March 11, 2013.
I use emacs on my headless servers and it's perfect but if you really want to work with it you loose time.
Take any big project you want to open a file from emacs you have to know the exact path, with atom (and sublime text) you just type the name and you get suggestions. Plus you can still use emacs shortcuts if you want.
Yeah emacs is good and useful but it's almost 50 years old it's like telling us "why would you want a nexus when the 3310 already exists?".
No, you take the core of emacs and add a pretty shell around it that adds these features you are talking about. Such as quick way to open files, and so on. There is no need to re-invent core text editing.
