I use Emacs but also completely 'hijacked' the way it works with keyboard shortcuts, making it similar to a GUI editor and ignoring/disabling typically emacs-y chords.

Good thing being that Emacs is powerful enough to completely change itself without much effort.

I am glad you shared that.

I did exactly this but was always too afraid to admit it publicly, because of Emacs 'purism' users.

I love Emacs exactly because of how highly customizable everything is (without other editors bloat) but equally because I can leverage the huge user-base to not spend an infinity amount of time on customizing.

Although I appreciate other people's experience may be different with vi/vim/emacs, in my personal case I don't have to remote into other machines so I can get away with a custom init.el on my machine.

Use sticky keys and then the deault Emacs key combos are trivial to press conveniently without any straining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_keys

Or give god-mode or evil a try.

I use god-mode but found that capitalizing letters using the shift key was the biggest cause of pain for me. I retrained my left hand to use the ring finger for shift and added a post-command-hook to turn ",x" into "X", and the problem is largely gone. I also make a point to swap _ and - and also ; and : in certain modes (ahem Python) . My right pinky is still too active (RET and punctuation, but I rarely get any pain, even with a tiny laptop keyboard

That's an interesting conclusion, I find I do a lot less chording than your average Emacs user. Maybe the problem is chording. I've not yet had any issues (though I am also a Dvorak user, and a buckling spring user). I think today's Emacs is set up in a way that could cause problems on keyboards where the left Ctrl is not on the corner.

I can't imagine using emacs and not swapping ctrl and caps lock. It's one of the first things I do on any computer I get.

I just made caps lock an additional control and made a couple shortcuts for my most frequently used keys. Though talking about how one uses emacs is hard, since no two emacs uses have the same workflow.

Similarly, I switched from vim to GUI editors for the same reason.