Is it?
If you want an editor that is configured with a real language go for Emacs. Lisp is great, Emacs Lisp is easy to pick up, extension possibilities are endless. On the other hand this involves learning new language, which isn’t great for users who need a tool.
Try blocks that you’re referring to as if aren’t really if, because they will silently fail without causing troubles to working Kakoune even if you will put complete gibberish inside it. if will. This is major difference between if and try.
Kakoune’s approach is to be as minimal as possible to allow as much extensibility as possible. That’s why it allows shell expansions, which can call any language. Many scripts use awk and perl to do heavy lifting based on Kakoune’s state that is exposed to shell via variables.
This way you don’t really need scripting language. Trust me, I’ve written several plugins for Vim, several plugins for Kakoune, and some code in Elisp, and I can say that Vim < Kakoune < Emacs in terms of configuration language. Given that VimScript is a complete language, it still my least preferable, because it is a horrible language. Kakoune has no language but it allows me to choose what language to use with it, because it provides POSIX interface. Emacs is a lisp machine itself so there’s no option for other languages really (yet you can use them but why would you?).
Sorry if I may sound rough, didn’t really meant anything like this