I spent a good while reading your replys and one of the things you keep saying is cheat sheet. Now I dont use a cheat sheet because my fingers have become accustomed to the way vim works. The other thing you are saying a lot is that it takes time to switch modes. It does not. For most people you have to move your fingers off of the home key row to click delete or control so it is easier to just use the keys closer saving lots of time. The other thing you said is that modal editing has become obsolete which is simply not true because almost every IDE comes with a VI(M) mode and is not restricted to the non modal form. Also you say that hjkl are inefficient you have to move your entire hand to use the arrow keys but with hjkl you just have to keep it in the same place.
Then I shall be clearer and say that I disagree that vi/vim is harder to use than an editor that needs a command-line flag to enable search-and-replace and doesn't do case-insensitive search at all.