I hear you. Yeah, the problem with changing or updating Emacs is it's been too successful. No one can change its constitution without breaking everything that makes it great.

The leg that I'm trying to stand on is, Emacsy isn't a text editor. It does not use elisp. No Emacs code will ever run on it. It provides a set of Emacs-like facilities that do not currently exist in a lot of interactive applications. So the project has the opportunity to make a clean break with past and still provide something of value. We'll see if can obtain even a sliver of the success that Emacs has.

I updated the FAQs to hopefully be more clear on this issue.