[thomastjeffery]

The main reason vim users aren't writing elisp is mostly because they don't want emacs.

Sure, they might really like the underlying functionality emacs has, but even evil-mode can't completely hide emac's UI.

I wish there was an emacs with a totally user-defined UI, so some people could configure their UI to feel like Vim, others like emacs, and others as something completely different.

Sure, you can replace the default keymaps, but that only gets you so far. If you go down this road (I have), it quickly becomes a futile effort to remove the emacsness from your UI.