My impression when looking at HN is that people are not that impressed with Atom. Nobody I know in the real world uses atom, but I'm a poor data point.
The reason why everybody is up in arms about every minor update is that a lot of people see every little peep from the dev as (hopeful) proof that the project isn't dead.
People here still get excited about LISP, too. I can understand Clojure, but Lisp, come on! It was in the 80s and 90s when I used LISP for AI and my favorite muLISP, but it's 2015 already! So, this is a boutique community, don't make generalization from it. Atom is doing pretty well for its infancy!
I was super excited about Intype in the past - much more excited about anybody could be about Sublime. After many, many years and ruined potential, I gave up. Just recently found that it's still alive. I remember e as well. It got open-sourced... and what? There are many editors, but Atom has all indications that's it's here to stay! I'm not so sure about Sublime given the patterns. A loyal community is not enough - a dedicated development team is what's most important!
Didn't know HN means Historian News. People just are so excited about LISP here, because of some loyalty to Paul Graham. Smalltalk and Forth get a lot less attention than LISP although they share a lot of its beauty - simple yet powerful syntax. Well, sometimes I also wonder if this is Haskell News, too. :)
The reason why everybody is up in arms about every minor update is that a lot of people see every little peep from the dev as (hopeful) proof that the project isn't dead.