> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible

I honestly can't even relate to what that even means. I'm a programmer - my everyday job is all about changing the behavior of computer systems - local, remote, cloud, embedded, etc. Requirements change, scope fluctuates, problem space evolves - grows and shrinks, accretion is unavoidable. I need to routinely move between language stacks, different data types, formats, CLI and web tools, protocols, paradigms, OSS and proprietary apps.

That means I have to constantly adapt, my control plane has to keep up with the flux. Automation is key - you must develop a mentality for that - every little annoyance can be and shall be automated. That is an endless, non-stop transformation of my workflow - continuous maintenance of my tooling. But that is not some toilsome, reactive maintenance.

Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't want to constantly build software for your own sake is a delusion - it's like a cook that hopes to turn on the stove only in the restaurant, but won't touch a knife at home.

Emacs is the cook's home kitchen. I'd say there are two kinds of maintenance: reactive (fixing breakage, keeping up with churn) versus generative (shaping tools to match your evolving understanding). Programmers instinctively dislike the first and should be drawn to the second. Emacs is almost uniquely suited to generative maintenance because the tool and the work share the same substrate.

I get your complaint about Emacs specifically, it's a common: "too much work to set up", which usually means: "I don't want to invest before I get value", which honestly is not wise, strategic thinking. Treating Emacs as the universal tool for minimizing total maintenance burden over a career, over a lifetime is.

To summarize: your claim is that choosing to spend your energy on anything other than your emacs setup is a catastrophic failure in terms of ROI, a delusion, and a sort of dereliction of identity as a programmer. My rebuttal: dude, relax.