This is the kind of research that I would expect an article like yours to make. It is totally fair to contact the people who worked on this, instead of being smug about it and caricaturing the Emacs maintainers as conservative.

Regarding :vc and :load-path, this was obsoleted transitively due to the obsoleting of package-vc-install-from-checkout, which has portability issues. Bug#80604 goes into the background for this. This is NOT an obsoletion of the :vc keyword for use-package.

Regarding package-autosuggest, this is disabled because it doesn't interest most users. It is targeted at new users who aren't familiar with the packages, and might be interested in new major modes. Experienced users are generally either familiar with the packages and use them or prefer to stay in fundamental mode. The minor mode is enabled as part of the newcomers theme!

No mention of package-review-policy, which especially in the "age of AI" is an important feature is you want to be careful about external code you are using on your system.

Oh and on the topic of the newercomers theme, the reason it is not mentioned "higher up" in the NEWS file, besides it being the wrong section, is that it is highlighted on the splash screen, where new users are going to find it, instead of a NEWS file.

Furthermore, macros and functions constitute a kind of function coloring. To use a macro in a function, like defcustom, you couldn't pass the name of the user option you are defining in as a symbol, as that is not evaluated. So instead you'd have to call eval on a runtime constructed expression, which is a cludge.

So I agree with the top comment, to avoid macros is a sign of Lisp maturity. It is easy and fun to admire them when you are coming from languages with arbitrary restrictions in their macro systems like C, but ones you get used to them you don't treat them with any more wonder than any other arbitrary restriction that a language may lack (bad ad hoc example: nobody praises C for the lack of a CALL keyword).

The more fundamental question for me is why the author didn't decide to make make code blocks non-breaking by default, or just add the class annotations when he writes the HTML?

This is generally my only real complaint about systemd. I don't care if it is too monolitic, written in C or whatever, I just want a straightforward syntax for straightforward operations. I'd like it if systemd could recognize if a .target file is a shell script and just do "the right thing". Perhaps it would make sense for a timer file to recognize cron syntax as well. Or at least allow for a kind of extensibility so that I can have it supported.

If systemd had a little more respect for existing conventions, I am pretty sure it wouldn't be so controversial. After all, system administrators like it because they use it all the time, but a regular, full-timer user like me, who only deals with it when something is broken or have to use it as a means-to-an-end to set something up, then all friction is annoying and bad UX. (And no, using Nix is not the solution)