I have more or less the same problem coming from vi(m). I forced myself to use Emacs for about 2-3 months to get past the "this is hard because it is unfamilia

I have more or less the same problem coming from vi(m). I forced myself to use Emacs for about 2-3 months to get past the "this is hard because it is unfamiliar" stage. I found Emacs to be relatively pleasant as an environment for hacking source code but I was nowhere near the same level of proficiency at editing with it after several months of usage compared to where I was within a few weeks of forcing myself to learn vi(m). Emacs has a lot going for it as far as out of the box functionality and the ease of installing packages but it seems that unless you want to take the time to dive deep and learn the minutiae of elisp and configuration you are never really going to become super proficient with it. The one thing I did come away with after using Emacs was that swapping ctrl/capslocks is the best thing ever and helps even with vi(m) and I now do that for all my environments even though I never touch Emacs anymore.