I used vim for 20 years before switching to emacs. I'd actually tried switching twice. Firt time with viper (I think), which didn't have good enough vim emulation. Second time evil-mode finally convinced me to switch completely.
Then I ran in to the same issue as you, that a lot of emacs modes had native emacs keybindings. So what I wound up doing was re-binding those to be more vim-like. I didn't rebind everything, just the things I most used, and it's worked great for me. I'm still a happy emacs user.
It did help that I already knew lisp and scheme, so getting up to speed with elisp was relatively painless. And it helped a lot that at the time I made the switch I was out of work and had a ton of free time on my hands. Don't think I would have been able to do it without that time, as it did take a ton of time to customize emacs enough to compete with the vim setup I had cobbled togather over 20 years.
It was totally worth it for me. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it to every veteran vim user, unless they have lots of time on their hands. On the other hand, I've heard that Spacemacs has a lot of sane defaults for vim users. So maybe Spacemacs+evil is the answer. I haven't tried it myself yet, since I have a ton of custom vim bindings of my own in emacs now, and very little free time to experiment these days.
You're absolutely right that it takes a bunch of time to set Emacs up initially. I took a week off work for unrelated reasons and spent a few evenings of that time to set up Emacs with evil-mode and it was totally worth it. However, I did put off doing it for over a year before that, because I didn't have the time to spend.
An important realisation was that I only need my Emacs to do the basic Vim things and then some extensions I commonly use. At that point, I can survive using only Emacs and building onto it as I feel like I need something.
Then I ran in to the same issue as you, that a lot of emacs modes had native emacs keybindings. So what I wound up doing was re-binding those to be more vim-like. I didn't rebind everything, just the things I most used, and it's worked great for me. I'm still a happy emacs user.
It did help that I already knew lisp and scheme, so getting up to speed with elisp was relatively painless. And it helped a lot that at the time I made the switch I was out of work and had a ton of free time on my hands. Don't think I would have been able to do it without that time, as it did take a ton of time to customize emacs enough to compete with the vim setup I had cobbled togather over 20 years.
It was totally worth it for me. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it to every veteran vim user, unless they have lots of time on their hands. On the other hand, I've heard that Spacemacs has a lot of sane defaults for vim users. So maybe Spacemacs+evil is the answer. I haven't tried it myself yet, since I have a ton of custom vim bindings of my own in emacs now, and very little free time to experiment these days.