I should have made note that the reason why I picked vim over emacs for general coding is that I found the various modifier key combinations required to seriously aggravate my RSI (I was unable to complete the tutorial); on the other hand, vim's modal editing has been a huge help. I'm aware of evil mode, so perhaps I'll have to go that route...
The ctrl+spacebar and search way that Light Table works, while not the fastest, was still preferable to holding down multiple modifier keys.
All that being said, the source of my hand pain might actually have to do with my neck and back, as working on those areas has substantially relieved my pain. So perhaps that will no longer be a barrier to emacs usage in a few months. :)
No, you're right. Emacs default keybindings and especially the longer 'chords' for frequently used commands are horrible.
I've never used the defaults[1] for long. First by making my own custom keybindings, then by making keybindings compatible to what most others applications use and a couple of years ago by switching to evil-mode. I already had vi/Vim experience so that was pretty optimal.
[1] Except some really basic ones that I also use in the shell: C-a, C-e, C-r, etc.
If you don't like to chord, you can always use M-x, the same way as invoking commands in light table and even better. See helm-M-x: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html#sec-4
Like Unix you can't grok all of it (ever), but you won't ever need all of it. Just learn more of it as you go along. See it as a trip :-)
And if you need your Emacs Clojure development environment right now, have someone make a VM for you.