Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> If Emacs were 100% as convenient and attractive as other editors,
> it is possible that a lot of users would use it.  30 years ago,
> the user profile of Emacs was much broader than it is today.
> It would be good to make this happen again.

I would personally say that several of the starter packs (Spacemacs and
Doom immediately come to mind) are "attractive" and "modern", and don't
really sacrifice any functionality to achieve that.  Spacemacs is also
very easy to set-up and use.  (Doom's also getting there).
> But that would require a number of changes, and I don't think that
> round corners would get us close to there.

Agreed.

> If there are people who want to work on rounded corners, and assuming
> they do a good job, I won't argue against it.  But if you want
> to attract more users to Emacs, I think there are more important
> areas for improvement.

I'm working on something that uses GTK foreign rendering to draw button
and input field backgrounds as face boxes;  I should be able to get it
in a usable state soon (right now it only works on top of another set of
patches I'm working on that make Emacs a pure GTK app).