I think part of the reason that vim and emacs are so powerful but also so hard to learn is that they were created before we had nice homogenous operating environments with a standard 108 key keyboard and Graphical User Interfaces.
They both come from a day when all UI's were text based and so it's not surprising that they offer more powerful editing models than newer alternatives, considering they've both had 30 odd years of refinement.
It's also understandable that people find them more difficult to use. The major advantage that a GUI has over a text interface is that it's more discoverable and given that most people these days have grown up around GUI's, we thus find text based UI's intimidating.
Either way, as developers, most of our day to day tasks revolve around editing text, so I'd say that using a tool that's aimed at giving us maximum textual love is a good thing.
The main issue is that any text editor which is sufficiently advanced will be far removed from the standard CUA + GUI model that most people are used to. With such a separation, everybody has to start at ground zero when learning the new editor. CUA modes are the only sort of learning-curve helper that I can think of, but that doesn't help much because then people just keep their dependence to CUA. They have to immerse themselves in the editor to actually learn it; not get caught up in a "compatibility" mode that makes it easier to use when they start.
But why must powerful editors be far removed from CUA? As I see it, the only reason emacs/vim aren't CUA is that they were written before CUA existed. Couldn't an editor be made, with the same power as emacs/vim, but that did take advantage of all the modern things we've been accustomed to?
And don't get me started on asking why, after all this time, emacs still defaults to non-CUA when it has a perfectly good mode that emulates it? That's just asking to keep new users away.
They both come from a day when all UI's were text based and so it's not surprising that they offer more powerful editing models than newer alternatives, considering they've both had 30 odd years of refinement.
It's also understandable that people find them more difficult to use. The major advantage that a GUI has over a text interface is that it's more discoverable and given that most people these days have grown up around GUI's, we thus find text based UI's intimidating.
Either way, as developers, most of our day to day tasks revolve around editing text, so I'd say that using a tool that's aimed at giving us maximum textual love is a good thing.