Comment by lproven

> Here's what a completely uncustomized emacs looks like

I think that the key thing you're missing here is that the contents of the menu matter as well as the visual presentation.

Emacs's menus, in my (very) limited experience, expose a very strange hodgepodge of Emacs concepts and terms in a very odd grouping that presumably makes some kind of sense for Emacs folks.

I am not an Emacs person. I use CUA interfaces everywhere. This determines and specifies the names of the menus, which ones have (...) meaning that they lead to a dialog box, which ones have (->) which means they lead to a submenu, and they have standard options in standard places.

The Emacs ones are just... weird random noise, in a random layout, that makes no sense to me, and the few parts that are vaguely recognisable make little to no sense.

It's not just the presentation. Users of menu-driven tools need the presentation and the content and the organisation of the content.