I think it could be a good idea to ask users, yes. However, "for the
first few minutes" is not a good criterion, IMO: we want to provide a
facility for easily finding important options for users who already
use Emacs for weeks, maybe months. The options "for the first few
minutes" are supposed to be on the Options menu already.
I felt that people are most confused on the first few minutes of using Emacs, but I won’t argue this before asked for real experience on reddit.
The grouping of the options must be based on some "themes" or similar,
to be useful. The challenge is, of course, to come up with a useful
list of such "themes", and then decide which options should each theme
enable.
Others has described the out-of-the-box experience of doom Emacs, it seems to me that such job is better done by a “distribution” of Emacs than by vanilla Emacs.
"Better" in what sense? What do the people who maintain Spacemacs orDOOM know about Emacs that we don't?
They can do things we can’t. They can bundle MELPA packages, they can set various defaults, they can promote one package over another, they can bundle a bunch of helper commands and configurations.
OTHO, vanilla Emacs could add a tiny guide like I proposed to more or less improve the life for those who started Emacs without reading any tutorial on the internet.
Sorry to be negative, but based on experience I have hard timebelieving in such guides: people who are involved in Emacs developmentare much better coding than writing good documentation, let alonetutorial documentation for newbies. Let's do what we do best: producefeatures that make it easier to discover and turn on popular features.
I welcome such profile functionality, that will be very nice. In the mean time, a guide still has its place: how would a new user know he can choose a profile otherwise? You can add a menu button or a link on the slash screen, but I doubt if anything can beat a guide on discoverability.
Not being good at writing tutorial for newbie is one thing, not doing it is another thing. If we want Emacs to be more newbie-friendly, we should have a friendly introduction built-in.