I agree with you to an extent but one important difference between VIM and Blender is that VIM tends to be the only tool a VIM user will use for editing code/text while a 3D artist will often use half a dozen or more tools to create a finished product (using focused tools in different areas of the pipeline -- it is not uncommon to use a focused modeller, say, even though technically you can model in Blender or Maya).

When you're using half a dozen tools and all of them either ship with or can easily be configured to handle Maya-style camera/mouse movement and Blender alone uses some wacky non-standard interface, it can really be jarring to context-switch to the Blender UI even if you are already familar with it.

I believe this lack of following de facto standards (and prior to 2.5 having no way to really configure to these standards) is a bigger factor in the rejection of Blender's legacy UI than the fact that it is hard to use for a beginner was.