Many times I find that sensible human beings can make sensible defaults. It tends to align with software I love to use. Being opinionated is not a sin if done right. Config hell is not a solution to this problem.
The "problem" is that there are so many different use cases. There are people using emacs on strange systems for decades and their opinions vastly differ from a new user looking for a javascript environment. There are lots of opinions in emacs, and usually when you want to do something to core you find out that there's a wide swath of users who have the opposite opinion to what you were thinking. It's not a bad thing, its just tough to do anything because there are so many packages, users, expectations, ranging from 1-25 years of behavior.
I very carefully didn't say being opinionated it was a sin, in fact I said completely the opposite. That design approach has produced some brilliant stuff (e.g. anything produced by Apple).
My point was that it wasn't the ONLY approach. It appears to be the best one for mass market consumer products, but developers do so many different things in so many different ways that a different approach might be more appropriate. Based on emacs' enduring popularity with a large chunk of users, it would appear that a lot of people agree.
