I love this explanation of why you like vim, because it's very honest, and one where I can disagree with your preference while having no problem with your argument.
My brain does not work like vim at all. I do not count words. I do not think about whether I want to change, jump or delete. Therefore, I've never been able to use any vi flavor even semi competently: I can technically work in it, and I have read about all the commands, but I am actually slower in Vim than I'd be in windows Notepad, because it's internals do not 'speak' to me at all.
I had a lot more luck with emacs, because I can ignore anything that even considers those low level operations, and just use it's higher level features, like buffers.
Still, I end up doing better in an IDE, because most of my editing is of code, and an IDE understands the code I am writing far better than emacs or vi could.
I regard my primary task as understanding code so I can write as little code as possible. I still write a lot of code, but I expect my editing environment to surface semantic information for me. Otherwise, I do it all myself. Why would I want to do that?
I've used Vim for a few years. I enjoy editing in it for sure. But it does feel like it optimizes the wrong thing. By the time it's time to write code, I'm more invested in the ideas than the mechanical action of implementing them. I also feel like core Vim is very good, but the experience suffers greatly once you enter Weird Plugin Land, where you need to set SpecialOption if using RandomPlugin version 0.88. I get why it happens; it's also a waste of time.
I don't have the patience for that. I dread maintaining my vimconfig for this reason.
My brain does not work like vim at all. I do not count words. I do not think about whether I want to change, jump or delete. Therefore, I've never been able to use any vi flavor even semi competently: I can technically work in it, and I have read about all the commands, but I am actually slower in Vim than I'd be in windows Notepad, because it's internals do not 'speak' to me at all.
I had a lot more luck with emacs, because I can ignore anything that even considers those low level operations, and just use it's higher level features, like buffers.
Still, I end up doing better in an IDE, because most of my editing is of code, and an IDE understands the code I am writing far better than emacs or vi could.