I've spent about half a decade in each too. And, not to get into an "editor war", but I disagree that Vim is the "better" editor, for the exact same reason you

I've spent about half a decade in each too. And, not to get into an "editor war", but I disagree that Vim is the "better" editor, for the exact same reason you think it is better. While I'm coding, I would rather press down a lot of times than press "7j" and try to either guess or count how many lines I need to jump downward. On my best Vim days, I spent more brain power than I'd have liked in just figuring out the most efficient or shortest command combinations to type to do what I'm trying. Whereas in Emacs, I just reuse the same keys and have no problem repeating them. In your example of "2bcw" I would do "M-b M-b M-d" and that's simpler and more automatic for me -- I don't have to think about it one bit.