One of the things I like most about Sublime is that it just works right out of the box. Sure almost everyone uses a plugin or two, but to me it's the editor that doesn't need blog posts about how to configure it, it doesn't require you to keep a git repository of your thousand-line configuration, it doesn't require an understanding of esoteric key commands to get started.

To me, Sublime is an editor for people who don't want to spend man-weeks fucking with their editor and just want to get to work.

It's half-way there. It could go a lot further. I'm really surprised there isn't a single (featureful) editor that follows the OSX/GNOME aesthetic of "convention over configuration; no preferences/options/modes if possible". Key-bindings are the same everywhere you go. Every command is available on every instance of the editor on everyone's machine, everywhere in the world. You never have to re-learn anything; you can just sit down and use all the features.

I would personally imagine something a bit like Sublime, but where all the "plugins" were actually just code contributed to the central codebase, and delivered by updates. (Specifically, I'm imagining it would work like Cloudflare's https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs for plugins.)

Given that the editor would then have "everything" in-the-box, it'd then probably have to have emacs-like modes, as well, to allow all the plugins' various key-bindings to live together.