The question I always ask myself as an outsider, is this actually weird and outdated, or is it something that, once you get used to, actually makes people able to work more optimally. Sometimes those power tool design decisions are just bad old decisions, sometimes they really do enable the user. Look at Vim, not for everyone, but if you are willing to learn to invest in its crazy, specific style of user interface people can fly in a way other interfaces don't seem able to quite keep up with.
There's always path to making things more approachable no matter how powerful they are.
You could alter vim in a way that people who have years of expeirience of computer use and browser use know at least how to quit goddamn thing without googling it. Or maybe even create short text, save it, open it again, move blocks of text around. For an average person vim has 100% less utility than the notepad.
The power of vim doesn't come from obscure keyboard shortcuts. It comes from editing using parametrized commands (as far as I understand). You could make modern editor with the same power as vim where a person can just sit in front of and start working with immediately and gradually learn that things she's doing manually she could do faster using command mode. And those commands might be the same as in vim because once you go beyond area of shared intuition you can do whatever you want.
The problem of vim is that it started in the era where shared intuition didn't cover basic text editing. And this area grew since then but vim refused to acknowledge this.
Is that a problem, or just reality? One thing I think of a lot these days is the "domain community and the beginner problem". Specifically, many communities I'm tangentially related to seem to overcompensate for beginner comfort at the risk of missing the entire depth of the domain.
I do not see it as a problem that Vim doesn't supply the features you're describing, though I do understand where you're coming from. I am affirmed in my view when we remember that vim runs in a terminal emulator, and the features you're describing are non-trivial to implement in that environment.
I don't mean to sound pedantic, but I don't see this as a problem at all. As it relates to Vim, or many other tools and domains. If Vim was incentivized to increase the size its user-base, I may agree, but this is not the case.
You can't always build something that lets you act like a beginner and gradually transition to the power user version, or at least people haven't always found ways to make that work. The UX challenge of allowing both experiences in the same app, especially with the ability to gradually move from one to the other, is very very complex.
I agree it's hard. Though my claim is that lack of will is more of a factor than complexity of way.
If any of vim great ideas ever enters shared intuition about computers it won't be due to development of vim.
Ability to gradually transition between beginner user towards power user is natural way all modern software is written. That's why you have menus and can point things with mouse and often drag stuff around, and have a cursor and a text box where cursor keys and home and end and delete and backspace and shift works. And you have hints and indications of keyboard shortcuts. Plenty of stuff is discoverable.
You start with shared understanding and build upon that.
Some legacy UIs like Blender evolve and adapt to broadening shared intuition others like vim fail to.
