> One decade? How long can this go on? Two decades? Three? If one is in the middle of their professional career before they've mastered all the "vim skills" (or even more so, the more numerous) Emacs skills, then they'll never gonna master them all in time to matter anyway.

I think you're mistaken in thinking there's a solution to this problem, or even that it's a problem.

The limiting factors here are your rate of learning and when you stop learning. Continuing to learn well into your career is a feature, not a bug.

> And the point of internal vs third party is not if internal are numerous enough, but if they're productive, convenient enough. Internally vim has tons of features, but it doesn't have a linter, for example.

I have a linter. It doesn't need to be in my editor, and I rarely make linting errors anyway. When I do make linting errors, I want it to be a bit painful so I stop making linting errors.

I'd argue that the bugs introduced by your linter are worse than the problem they solve. And the more plugins you have, the more buggy your system is due to the interactions.

> In any case, things one still discovers "a decade in" are not really an argument for not setting up a good main driver vim environment with more than built-in conveniences. Those wont prevent you from learning vim built ins, and you could get immediate access to features, and in a more convenient form, that could take you a decade to chance upon as built-ins.

Chance across? Don't plugins have the same problem, that you have to wait to chance across them? If you're actively out searching for plugins to solve your problems, you'll find them, but if you just google how to solve the problems with builtin tools, you'll find that too.

Plugins absolutely prevent you from using builtins, and frequently break the builtins to boot. You're probably right about the very basic stuff (i.e. movement, deletion, insertion) but anything beyond that is frequently broken on systems with a lot of plugins.