> I'm mostly reading/searching/navigating
I think you need someone sufficiently experienced to give you the tour of what's possible in Emacs. Search is what sold it to me and I have never seen anything close to that in any type of software I ever used, and I've been programming for a long time - decades.
When someone showed me just a few ways of performing different kinds of search tasks in Emacs, it blew my mind. Wait a minute. You can search by grouping categorically, with regexp, with sparse-trees, sorted - by recency, alphanumerically, contextually; narrowed, expanded, in a grid-view, in a list, incrementally as you type; forward, backward, wrapped; fuzzy; by out-of-order separator tokens; by scope; by structure; by history; by class; by tree-sitter node shapes; in your browser history, in Google, Wikipedia, GitHub, YouTube, etc. etc.?
And because Emacs is insanely text-oriented it fits amazingly to use with LLMs. Just look at the number of different packages people keep building in it¹. You can query a model anytime, anywhere, I'd be typing some text (like this very comment for example) and then I can start chatting with an agent right there, in the same buffer - e.g. for fact-checking my assumptions. Then I can collapse the irrelevant points and focus on the substance, I can peek into the collapsed sessions individually, or I can open them in an indirect-buffer and start chatting on some specific point there.
In my coding assistant buffer, while typing a prompt, I can use a different model, with different parameters, within the same or different context to adjust the prompt itself. Then I can compare the rewrite changes on the spot - using different methods - line-based or three-way-merge diff, etc.
Or even wilder scenario - I'd be reading some article in a foreign language, I get automatic translation popup for every word, paragraph or selected region - all "smart", all based on where the cursor position is. Then, if I'm confused about a word, I can bring wiktionary² or definition lookup buffer. Guess what? I can start chatting with an agent in that same buffer asking it I dunno, if there's an Arabic influence on the word or whatever.
Because the agents have introspective capabilities, they can easily reach to other buffers, multiple agents working in parallel can empirically analyze the state of things, you basically get orchestration pretty much for free - it's just a matter of building proper skills.
I don't know what and how you evaluated things, but no other harness tool I've seen in the wild has reached the point of flexibility and malleability level of it. Emacs remains uncontested king of all sorts of text manipulation. It's not an editor, it's entirely something else.
¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1uwm3c0/the_state_of...
² https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el