Saying that as someone using Emacs for at least 20 years: ignore the zealots, get rid of this FOMO and ask yourself if there are 3 things missing from your tools, things that you would like to have a better way of doing. For these things, find someone experienced with Emacs and ask them to show you how they do it.
Unless your passion is in going meta and focus on building the tools instead of using them, chances are that your current tools can do what you need just fine.
Indeed. There is some satisfaction in customizing things in order to get things done more easily, but there is more satisfaction, hopefully, in shipping code.
I used TECO to get grades back in the day, on a DEC-10. People used to write BASIC interpreters in TECO for fun. Then I went into the wilderness, where every system I used was uncustomizable. And then DOS, where Turbo C and Brief were kings. Eventually the system I used was Windows, and MS Developer Studio (before Visual Studio) had some macro recording capability. Then I joined a company where everything was just more convenient if you put Linux on your desktop, and for my limited Windows work, one of the Windows ports of Emacs was adequate, and a couple of our brightest were always using Emacs. These were the guys I wanted to emulate so I started using Emacs. But then I branched off and started using Eclipse, because I couldn't get ctags to work well enough with all the C++ code I was working with. Eclipse's remote solution seems to be dead so now I'm using Code.
Agreed, and this is not specific to Emacs or even text editors. The same can be applied to operating systems or even hardware. There are a lot of people out there that will spend more time tweaking and playing with their tools than actually using them. It's fine if you're doing it for the experience or for enjoyment, but don't delude yourself into thinking you're actually spending your time productively and that all of that work is "eventually" gonna pay off.
My biggest increase in productivity was to stop tweaking and just switch to a mainstream OS and use a mainstream editor using the stock config as much as possible (I only changed a handful of settings). I honestly can't think of anything in my current workflow that is a bottleneck to my productivity; the tools are fast enough that the bottleneck is now my brain and thoughts and tweaking the tools won't fix that.
OP says he is experienced with vi, so it is not his case and I don't want to be playing a game of "unlikely hypotheticals"
But, even if that were the case, the recommendation would be to either (a) find a lighter alternative to the used IDE or (b) switch to an IDE that is plugin-based to remove all of the "bloatware". At no point I would be telling people that the first alternative for them to "be fast" is to join the church of Emacs.
Fuck, I worked with junior developers who were more comfortable after I showed them they could work with gedit + terminal instead of cargo-culting whatever tool some nerdy senior used.
All I am asking is to not be like those photographers that spend more time on forums discussing about equipment than actually taking pictures, or audiophiles that focus so much on testing their equipment that they forget to enjoy the music. Unless you are a camera maker/speaker designer/software tool developer, focusing on the tools instead of the product is quite a stupid way to live.
Unless your passion is in going meta and focus on building the tools instead of using them, chances are that your current tools can do what you need just fine.