You bring up some interesting points. One question worth pondering, though, is "what does it mean for a tool to be powerful"? Since you brought up VIM let's tak

You bring up some interesting points. One question worth pondering, though, is "what does it mean for a tool to be powerful"? Since you brought up VIM let's take text editors as an example. VIM is indeed a powerful editor. It gives you a lot of tools for quickly editing text. The problems I face, usually aren't related to typing. It's in figuring out what to type in the first place, and where to type it. When dealing with a large code base, the things I need most are code navigation capabilities. What is this? Where is it used? What does the call graph look like? Etc. Is VIM the most powerful tool for code navigation? No. It's far from it. One of the best is a tool called source insight. It's simple, fast and easy to use. No one will ever tell you are cool for learning how to use it, because you don't have to learn how to use it. It just works. There's no sense of mastery involved. It just works. It brings the information to you, when you need it, in the context it's needed in. That makes it VERRY powerful. You can say the same thing about a phone. Bringing you information in a way that is efortless and enjoyable is powerful. It may not be "cool" with the same ubergeek street cred you get from learning VI. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful. Far from it.