Emacs is my preferred text editor. I don’t use old-fashioned text editors as much as I used to, because I often need more specialized tools. I use IDEs for various programming languages and other things when producing high quality documents. And yet, I often wish I could subsume these with a tool that had the basic goodness of emacs.
I love the ease of customization of Emacs and other text editors, but they're just plain dumb when it comes to knowing programming languages.
Me thinks you haven't used emacs as much as "other text editors." There are very few features that people "wish" emacs had, that it doesn't actually have.
Specifically, language recognition is not just regexes in emacs.
Perhaps this is not the right forum but does anyone know of a good emacs mode for jump-to-definition in Python? I've used ctags and jedi but haven't been able to configure anything as awesome as the Python plugin for IntelliJ (same as PyCharm). To implement it, it would require a combination of static analysis and on-the-fly interpretation, given Python's duck typing. If emacs had this, I would use emacs all the time.