This bothers me too, as a vi / vim user of 20 years, I've always respected emacs even if I didn't want to use it. But now it's getting to be where vim too is laboring under a big pile of hacks, and in a worse language than elisp. Recently I've switched to kakoune for development, which innovated where it counts by implementing new ideas about the core job of editing text. I'll still use plain vi as $EDITOR, because I know it's always there for me, but vim-as-an-ide is not for me.