and not even a "full" Lisp, last I checked it was a special emacs version of Lisp, with a lot of ways to end up with unstructured code (freedom) hence leading to "emacs bankruptcy". I think the concepts are nice though, just needs to be refined - difficult given the legacy and following emacs has..
I don't think that Emacs Lisp needs to be a "full Lisp", whatever that would be, but it would need, for example, some improvements in the structuring of large programs, since there is now a lot, and still growing, amount of code written in it. Namespaces/modules and threading would be examples for improvements.
Emacs Lisp's language design was originally designed on Maclisp. Maclisp is long dead, but other descendants of Maclisp have been standardized (like Common Lisp and ISLisp). Emacs Lisp has been improved over the years (just two examples: lexical binding and native compilation), but there would be more to do at the base language. It's the task of the users and maintainers to do so and they have their own preferences.
