PE> I like the idea of having Emacs defaults being closer to what non-expert
PE> users expect.
I too like the thinking behind this change.
An extensive amount of work in making Emacs and XEmacs more approachable to new users was done years ago and was involved enough to warrant a new name, InfoDock, essentially a turnkey version of XEmacs, though many features were compatible with Emacs. InfoDock also was helpful to experienced users/software developers who wanted features automatically exposed and easy to find when needed. I was the primary author.
To have a look just at the extensive menubars and popup menus, see:
One a tgz archive is unpacked, below the infodock/id-lisp/infodock/ directory are the id-menus.el and id-menubars.el files shown in the gist above.
An experienced Emacs Lisp developer could get the menus of InfoDock working as an alternative menu-UI within a week I would think. The easymenu.el package runs XEmacs menus pretty well, I think. Then just update commands as necessary. Then people could evaluate it and see whether it is worth adding as an option to Emacs. The menubars themselves provide a button that allows switching between default menus and InfoDock-style ones. I have assigned my Emacs code to the FSF, so the copyrights would just need to be updated.
So instead of making small incremental changes that have small impacts, there is a way to make major improvements fairly quickly.