1. Your main point is clearly correct. But the counterpoint is that it's not scaleable for the emacs core developers to take the responsibility of maintaining the code from every third-party package that seems useful enough to include. A few years ago I wrote quite a bit of code for org-mode, so I've seen how this works. The org-mode team prepares a release (err, no test suite though! At least not back then.) And then some weeks/months ahead of a major emacs release, the org-mode codebase at an agreed commit gets copied over into the emacs code base. But from that point on, emacs core devs are on the hook for any mistakes we made. That clearly doesn't scale to many packages. So what you said notwithstanding, the only viable option long term is to make the package management system excellent, and to make the API via which packages interact with emacs core excellent.
2. Yes to what you say about the "starter kits". But things have completely changed since then with the arrival of package management and package repositories.
1. Your main point is clearly correct. But the counterpoint is that it's not scaleable for the emacs core developers to take the responsibility of maintaining the code from every third-party package that seems useful enough to include. A few years ago I wrote quite a bit of code for org-mode, so I've seen how this works. The org-mode team prepares a release (err, no test suite though! At least not back then.) And then some weeks/months ahead of a major emacs release, the org-mode codebase at an agreed commit gets copied over into the emacs code base. But from that point on, emacs core devs are on the hook for any mistakes we made. That clearly doesn't scale to many packages. So what you said notwithstanding, the only viable option long term is to make the package management system excellent, and to make the API via which packages interact with emacs core excellent.
2. Yes to what you say about the "starter kits". But things have completely changed since then with the arrival of package management and package repositories.