I can’t agree more with the point that Apple is waging a constant war against its users, especially developers. Developing anything for the platform is practically impossible without owning their devices and operating systems. And moreover, their licensing policy. Ugh… I can’t remember any other software company which treats developers so badly today.

Yes, you do need it. And btw the most prominent problem with emacs is its default keybindings. These are not suited for modern keyboards. The first thing you should do when you start customizing emacs is to rebind the keys. After that, everything would be way easier. There are a lot of key binding packages out there, just look for something that suits your needs or your habits.

Well, I was judging by its official page and Sourceforge activity, which seems negligible. However, Gitlab also does not seem very active (6 commits this year, despite lots of open bugs). The development is almost stalled. It is on life support, at best.

It is “SBCL or proprietary” nowadays. LW and ACL are fine but are pricy and well, proprietary.

CCL is all but dead.

ECL has a kind of limited niche, and is not as advanced as SBCL(e.g.: MOP). Same goes for ABCL. Also, ABCL is kind of slow.

Clasp is somewhat interesting, but it also has a limited niche (C++ interop) and is also not as advanced as SBCL.

GNU implementations are dead(GCL, CLISP)

Everything else is as dead as GNU implementations.