Exactly. There's such a great difference between Emacs with half a million of lines of Elisp loaded and a vanilla version that it's easier for me to just use Vim (it's everywhere anyway, but I can work with Vi too).
Using vanilla Emacs is like writing a GUI application with nothing but the primitive X (or GDI) operations. The potential is there and is visible, and it's sometimes the right thing to do, but normally you'd use GTK or QT, right? Same is true with Emacs: in its vanilla form, it's just an API for text editing with a bunch of outdated defaults. It's superb as a platform for writing text-editing related (and sometimes others) applications in Elisp. I think that Emacs is not supposed to be used in that state at all, even. Vim, on the other hand, is pretty much designed around one UI & text-editing philosophy, which makes it less extensible, but much more usable out of the box.
Using vanilla Emacs is like writing a GUI application with nothing but the primitive X (or GDI) operations. The potential is there and is visible, and it's sometimes the right thing to do, but normally you'd use GTK or QT, right? Same is true with Emacs: in its vanilla form, it's just an API for text editing with a bunch of outdated defaults. It's superb as a platform for writing text-editing related (and sometimes others) applications in Elisp. I think that Emacs is not supposed to be used in that state at all, even. Vim, on the other hand, is pretty much designed around one UI & text-editing philosophy, which makes it less extensible, but much more usable out of the box.