In my experience, fluidity of simple commands is not much of a problem, because muscle memory will take care of that eventually anyway.

However, C-x C-S-8 is certainly a more complex move than qq.

And the one for recording a macro to a register is even more complex. So complex in fact that I don't remember it. Hence I use those commands less often.

But the flip side is that something like occur or REPLs or magit or org-mode offer different benefits that you can not quantify in keystrokes as easily.

I guess there are different kinds of fluidity. To my mind, Vim is unmatched in low-level text manipulation fluidity. Emacs optimizes for a kind of higher level work flow fluidity.

Maybe Evil is the answer. But my brain has seemingly disparate modes for Vim and Emacs that are weirdly incompatible to each other.

Also, it helps to reimplement your favorite commands in Emacs. For example, I have M-s and M-r bound to something like f/F in Vim. Similarly, M-o and C-o act like o/O.