My feeling is that your point about vim and emacs applies more to vim than emacs. The caveat here is that I had ~15 years of vi/vim usage going on before switch

My feeling is that your point about vim and emacs applies more to vim than emacs. The caveat here is that I had ~15 years of vi/vim usage going on before switching to emacs ~5 years ago. I can plainly see where modal editing is foreign to new users from the start. However, I'm not sure emacs, which ships with "normal" keyboard shortcuts by default in most packagings, is the same. Emacs has a relatively smooth path from, "I'm going to use this like Notepad++" to "Emacs is my god / lover / email client now." At least that's my impression, and perhaps the warped impression of someone incapable of recognizing weirdness.