I'm with you. I'm an Emacs user, which ostensibly has a similar design philosophy (open source, with powerful extensibility from a full-blown programming language), but Emacs Lisp has a lot of baggage and is nowhere near as widely used as JavaScript. I also find the Emacs community disjointed and hard to navigate and participate in. Ultimately, assuming that the underlying design decisions of Atom are reasonable, its success will depend on the community that develops (double meaning intended) around it. It could be great.