It's true that a lot of people work with Javascript, but honestly I wouldn't say that they can contribute to anything right away. A lot of these people don't know more than
$('#element').hide();
In fact, I would wager that there are more potential contributors to Emacs than there are to Atom.
But if someone just wants to customize their text editor, $('#element').hide();, or something not orders of magnitude more complex, would actually be useful.
That's totally exaggerating. Anyone who is that green to code is probably not even thinking extending their editor yet, and any working programmer has picked up more than enough JS in their to be able to write and understand far more than that line.
Plus, Emacs is a ghost town anyway. You're going to run into the problem that there are not bodies willing to use the editor, let alone extend it.
Yeah, it's definitely true that a large percentage of people who "know" javascript have about that much knowledge. But still, if you look at absolute numbers of people who can make a function and write a for loop in JS, it's still going to dwarf the number of people who can loop and write a defun in elisp.
