I very much disagree, one of the things emacs is most frequently accused
of is bloat. Overhauling some of the defaults might be worth discussing,
but adding even more code to the core distribution seems to be the wrong
approach. IMO Emacs should focus on providing the core - an editing
engine and a lisp interpreter - and let the user decide which plugins he
wants to run.

I'd even go as far as claiming that currently there's already too much
stuff included by default. 24.1 has package.el included, there's no good
reason to ship every copy of emacs with several mail clients, org-mode,
two irc clients, and many other very domain-specific features. Don't
misinterpret this, I'm glad these packages exist and use them heavily,
but most occasional emacs users I know don't.

The question "what should Emacs be?" has been raised many times, and no
consensus could be reached. So cutting it down to the core and letting
each user decide seems like a reasonable consequence.


--
Philipp Haselwarter