I think not. Edit is to edit files in the terminal. What kind of files do you expect people to edit in the terminal? Most certainly files that would benefit from colors, not prose.
> “I’m 12 years late on this damn novel, and I’m struggling with it,” he said. “I have like 1,100 pages written, but I still have hundreds more pages to go. It’s a big mother of a book for whatever reason. Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this, but it’s tough.”
He's averaging a hundred pages a year. Maybe not the fastest, but certainly not the slowest writer. With the size of his books... Cut the guy some slack.
Seems like people have cut him a lot of slack already. Of course he doesn’t really owe anything to anybody, but at some point he and everyone else has to face the reality - which is that if that book is ever published, it’ll be posthumously, finished by a ghostwriter.
I think you're assuming people who are thinking of going beyond the original "point" of edit missed that point. We didn't. We're looking new directions it can go.
There's an underlying assumption about "target audience for this editor" that you both share, that others, I suspect quite a few others, do not.
For starters, there's your assumption that there is "syntax" to be highlighted. Not every text file is something written in a computer programming language.
You might not be wrong about percentages, but there are famously some Emacs users who for into it for Org mode or academic writing, including even some who learned to program long to better customize their Emacs setup and eventually became contributors.
But these are amateur geeks or geeks in the making who probably don't mind having the capability of syntax highlighting built in, even if for some purposes they want it turned off.