[zingar]

Absolutely baffled too. I was expecting that they preferred the vim philosophy of small tools that do one thing well, but no. So you like modal editing, well you’ve got it right there in emacs. Why that of all the potential gripes you might have with emacs?

[Alex63]

Just a guess, but I think the answer may be in another post he links to. He wants to move to a tool that will work out of the box. He's deliberately moving away from an editing tool that is super-customized. That seems to be consistent with other changes he is making in his work habits. Personally, I can relate to this. I don't edit very often these days and each time I do it seems like I have to do a bunch of dot file and package maintenance.