If I want Visual Studio Code, Atom, or Sublime Text, I know where to find them. I don't use those. I learned Emacs in college, along with ed and vi, and I still find these tools useful almost thirty years later precisely because they don't chase trends.

Those issues are covered by emacs distributions like spacemacs or doom emacs. I wouldn't use vanilla emacs but I don't think there's much reason to try fix it, the old school people like to build their own configurations on top of vanilla emacs, so changing that would interfere with their workflow, and if you want something more opinionated and functional by default, there's the distributions.

> use the keybindings that are common in most “modern” editors (think cua-mode)

Those hipster editors and their trendy 40-year-old standards.

I don't use backspace. By god, if the universe wanted us to make mistakes, then the typewriter I personally learned on would've had a correcting ribbon!

Emacs is an editor construction kit. Create whatever key bindings you want.

Maybe increase threading performance, or other things that can be used to help people build whatever they want from the construction kit.

> Create whatever... you want.

Yep, that's the perennial and solid argument in favor of open source software.

Whether that's desirable is obviously subjective and context-dependent.