The split here is between people who start it as a console application and those who start it as a GUI app. The former group start and stop it often, with separate instances running in each terminal. The latter don't, using emacs' server mode to get extremely fast "start up" times. The latter way is better, but if you really have to edit files on remote servers a lot then you might have to take the former approach. Yes you could learn to use tramp effectively also.
