IMHO, in my experience, in my wild card tests, Google's lack of focus on EMD is not quite as lacking as many have assumed.
if you spend some time doing random searches, i.e. Town / City + Service / Item, on page one of the results i am always getting EMD or Keyword loaded domain names, even ones with hyphens and tricks like 2 instead of to. having clicked on a few of them, it's not like the sites feature brilliant content, are responsive, etc.
as far as i can see EMD / Keyword domains are still something Google gets very excited about in the ranking, so it's a shame that it's been widely accepted that domain names are irrelevant.