I have done some work recently on trying to make Emacs work conveniently under any circumstances when started via emacsclient.
I have been trying to replicate the model of single-instance applications like Firefox and Libreoffice (because Emacs is naturally single-instance), where running the command when the application is not running will start a new instance, and otherwise, will start a new window in the existing single instance.
Using the "nearly-default" setting of empty ALTERNATE_EDITOR is pretty good, but the trouble is that "emacs --daemon" does not do X session support, so if I happen to start Emacs that way, I can then log out and back in and find that all my windows have disappeared, whereas if I started Emacs normally, it would save all my windows and their positions.
I can see there are reasons why a daemonised Emacs might not be able to support X sessions (for example, if it's started without access to the user's X display), but it would be nice if "emacs --daemon" supported the X session if it was able to, as then one could always use "emacsclient", knowing that if there wasn't a regular running Emacs, one would get one, and that in most cases (hopefully predictably!) it would DTRT.
Am I overlooking some reason why this is hard to arrange? If this worked, I would run "emacs --daemon" at X startup, to guarantee that it would be run in the "right" context.
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