Comment by eviks

> Surveys are not a good way of measuring the health of a specific project.

Why did you change the subject from popularity to project health?

> or the amount of Elisp projects on GH[3], and compare them to Wayback Machine snapshots from a few years ago, and notice that they keep increasing.

So? They can't really decrease as an abandoned project would just continue to exist. (If GH disappears then you'd have a big drop as a lot wouldn't get transferred). And a few users creating new packages can also sustain the growth for as long as you have a few users.

> The slow but steady growth

Which you don't have, users are the key metric here, and that's low and not growing

> Explosive growth is not good for an OSS project.

Not good, but excellent, but that's not the only alternative. Increasing share to 40% over 40 years wouldn't have been explosive

> I haven't noticed any elitism in the Emacs community.

You're entitled to your rosy observations of the "community", but the topic was more narrow - the ineffectiveness of overcomplicated filters in igniting passion.

> There's no gatekeeping since anyone is free to use Emacs how they want to use it.

There always is, for example, there are big iron gates blocking changes in the default health hazardous emacs-pinky keybinds. Of course, of course, if you waste enough time you'll be able to passionately hack a better system yourself, more power to you!

> So I think you have the wrong idea and an axe to grind for some reason, which I can't really help you with.

Indeed, much easier to conjure a fantasy axe