Then `export EDITOR=vi` in your profile? Or in whichever global config file in /etc is appropriate, or possibly using your distro's alternatives system? This is an extremely solvable problem.
That's fair:) I would say that you should automate it by using ansible or something like that, but I've done that and there's still a very jarring few minutes while you're running the initial install and getting enough of a system for ansible to run on.