> nevermind why I should consider taking a year (an eternity in technological time) to master it.
I don't want to proselytise, but maybe that hints at one of the core appeals of emacs. A year is nothing in terms of the span of time emacs has been around, and so time invested in making emacs your editor is effort that won't be discarded in the next technological cycle.
The other aspect is what I mean by "making emacs your editor"; emacs has had a lasting appeal because it is so general, and so malleable. Emacs becomes a construction material for your personal editor, and everyone who uses it seriously ends up with something idiosyncratic and ad hoc, in the best senses of those words.
Visual Studio, or Eclipse have been around for a fair while as well now. Its not like they will disappear with the next text cycle. And you can get productive with them in far less than a year.
Every five years or so I decide to give whatever editors/IDEs are in vogue a decent shot, to make sure I'm not missing out on anything (better still is to work along side of someone who is really productive in a radically different environment, like acme). Usually I come away from it with a few tweaks to my emacs configuration, but I have yet to be compelled away from emacs.
For example, I gave Visual Studio another shot recently (VS2013); and I mean, I read books on using it productively, I read the various tip blogs, advice for customization online, et cetera; I used it extensively. Unfortunately, I just don't see what people see in it. From my point of view, it's still slow, cumbersome, expensive (for any version with features that are actually useful), much less featureful than (customized) emacs, and doesn't run on most of the platforms I use to develop software. In theory, I could dedicate a few years writing extensions for one of these IDEs to duplicate all the emacs modes I use, but I'd probably never be able to fix, for example, buffer switching, or all the places where the mouse is the preferred form of interaction, or where modal dialogs steal focus (let alone all the dialogs that inexplicably aren't resizable). Meanwhile, the nice features like Intellisense and so on are the kind of customizations I've had in emacs for most of my prefered languages for years anyway.
I think you can also be quite productive in Emacs in a much shorter time.
The difference is: the flexibility of IDEs stops after a while, and then there's nothing new to learn to become more efficient. With Emacs, you can keep on learning and optimizing your work environment.
Disclaimer: I work with Eclipse almost exclusively these days, also because for Java it's so much better, IMHO.
Emacs still runs on more platforms than VS and Eclipse, using fewer system resources, and is applicable to a larger diversity of programming / work tasks. There are not so many tools that are both that ubiquitous and long-lived.
I don't want to proselytise, but maybe that hints at one of the core appeals of emacs. A year is nothing in terms of the span of time emacs has been around, and so time invested in making emacs your editor is effort that won't be discarded in the next technological cycle.
The other aspect is what I mean by "making emacs your editor"; emacs has had a lasting appeal because it is so general, and so malleable. Emacs becomes a construction material for your personal editor, and everyone who uses it seriously ends up with something idiosyncratic and ad hoc, in the best senses of those words.