The problem here is that no matter how much you like vim, when you argue against the most important paradigm (defaulting to normal mode) that makes vim so power

The problem here is that no matter how much you like vim, when you argue against the most important paradigm (defaulting to normal mode) that makes vim so powerful, the people who understand and appreciate this feature will assume that you don't like vim itself. And then you'll get people saying that you're utterly clueless. Vim is a tool. Let me say that again. VIM IS A TOOL. It's purpose in life is not to be easy to use or to garner the biggest user base. It's purpose in life is to make text editing as efficient as possible. That means that you default to normal mode. Period. If you don't live in normal mode, then you just don't grok vi(m). I'm not sure what's different about our use cases, but I find the vim defaults to be quite reasonable. I have a .vimrc file, but pretty much consists of syntax highlighting and tabstop settings. And I differ from the mainstream here anyway.