Exactly the difference between emacs and most of the software world is that for most of the software world your post would end at “The defaults are absolutely awful. The editor is pretty unusable.”
E.g., re the GP's complaint about lack of CUA: CUA is an IBM effort to standardize a dozen shortcuts that are considered more or less universally useful.
But Emacs predates CUA by a couple of decades, and supports easy access to an insanely wider (two, three orders of magnitude) space of functionality.
If you want CUA, Notepad is 100% conformant.
Disclaimer: Yes I would adore a clean pure new Emacs, but given the dearth of Stallmans, the new Emacs would take even longer to not have CUA by default.
Panta rhei - you can either pick a tool that comes with you, or deal with switching at each stop on the river.
Only a couple of years if you're taking GNU Emacs specifically. About one decade if you're talking about editor macros for TECO.