Dired is THE feature that I can't live without. That one feature alone was worth the effort it took me to learn emacs all those years ago. Now I can't even tell you for the most part what keys do what. My fingers just know the way. There's a pretty good built in tutorial that is accessible simply by typing emacs and then ctrl-h and then hit t. Emacs X version, from what I remember, was always butt ugly. That's why I've always used emacs-nox.

People suck.