And pushing improvements (like saner defaults, and documentation for some of the under-documented built-in packages) upstream to Emacs itself.

For those reasonably comfortable with Emacs, I think you should build it from source, and get into the habit of fixing tiny documentation problems as soon as you come across them. Mind you, I have submitted a couple such patches to the ido built-in help and they have languished un-noticed for 2 months.

P.S. Another thank-you here for the starter kit -- I no longer use it, but I did for a year or so and it did teach me several features I wouldn't have known about otherwise.