You have to admit though that Sublime Text 2 is pretty ugly by default. Both theme and initial impression. I really enjoy using it now, but that's after four tries or so after I heard about it few months ago on HN.
Initial impression with ST2 is like playing jigsaw puzzles, it's a mix of mouse clicks and some weird text editing until you're comfortable with Cmd+Shift+P. I remembered my experience trying to adjust font size went on like this: Open preferences, hey wait what is default global settings? user file settings? Hm, let's try this one... wait I have to edit settings file? I better use Emacs then! Where I can find all available configuration options? Google search? Oops, that's for Sublime Text 1. ARGH!
Even though I do enjoy using it now, it still feel like playing jigsaw puzzles but with majority of pieces in its place. (Like recently: wait, ST2 can do split screens? Hmm, Cmd+Shift+P split... nothing? Let's try Google... none tell me how to enable it. 20 minutes later Ah, it's in the View/Layout!) I can see the whole picture now, just missing a little bits here and there.
I think the settings thing is sort of intentional. The assumption is that most users of ST2 like json, and the default file settings are well-commented in the JSON files. Also, it's weird that you thought you had to use Emacs, since clicking the menu option for a preference file opens that file in ST2. That being said, the whole global default/user default/file default system is pretty confusing to me. I think I get it, but I still put settings in the wrong files, which then don't work, and so on.
Another issue with ST2 is that, like you mentioned, for whatever reason, it's very hard to find answers to your questions via Google. You always either end up at some release notes that tell you the feature you want exists, but not how to use it, or at some forum posting from 200 years ago that's wildly out of date, and full of the usual wildly-stupid comments one finds in most internet forums. There are number of features that I now use daily that I only found out about through word-of-mouth. (To be fair, this last part is probably true for many people with many editors: "Oh, you can do $x in $EDITOR? Show me how.")
I completely agree, the menus and the options are pretty close to archaic. The developer has a bunch of work to do there. Once I got it down to an environment I liked I never had to touch it again, and with the nice package manager I never had to worry about new touching the package system again as well.
