Hello, folks. I'd like to throw my two cents in as a relatively new user. I've been using emacs for org-mode, coding, and irc on and off for a few years.
The display interface:
There is already a thread about emacs' square appearance, but many features of emacs would benefit from looking modernized. I agree with RMS that emacs will need some reimagined graphics library implementation to make that possible.
Customize:
This feature is conceptually simple but I found it almost hostile to interact with. Between, states and unintuitive input fields. I found it hard to understand what many functions and variables were meant to do or represent. The documentation for these values showed elisp, so I quickly transitioned away from customize. I don't know what I would improve here but I think that many new users are guided to this feature and I don't recommend them to play with it from personal experiences.
How should we poll new users and their initial interactions with emacs? Would a setup wizard be helpful for common bindings like modern kill-yank equivalents? While the philosophy funnels towards abandoning mouse cursors and buttons what would be intuitive features for transitioning from that kind of behavior?