It's not entirely about the size when talking about tons of depends and stuff, that's just more complexity to worry about. Note that this isn't some comment comparing complexity of emacs to (insert whatever you think I may be comparing) as I'd bet emacs is fairly simple compared to many things it could replace, I'm just throwing out the idea that when I personally am adverse to deep dependencies and tons of functionality, I'm usually worried about the complexities and not the size.