They're pushing QT as the programming framework for future versions of Symbian. I haven't tried it, and I don't know to what extent you still need to engage with the eccentricities of the Symbian C++ environment (error handling, memory management, string classes, etc), but it can only be an improvement.
And it looks like they plan to retire the old emulator (which is actually more of a simulator - it's a reimplementation of parts of the OS to run natively on Windows rather than on the Symbian kernel). In its place will be a real CPU-level emulator based on qemu:
http://blog.symbian.org/2009/11/20/an-introduction-to-the-sy...
