My brain does not work like vim at all. I do not count words. I do not think about whether I want to change, jump or delete. Therefore, I've never been able to use any vi flavor even semi competently: I can technically work in it, and I have read about all the commands, but I am actually slower in Vim than I'd be in windows Notepad, because it's internals do not 'speak' to me at all.

I had a lot more luck with emacs, because I can ignore anything that even considers those low level operations, and just use it's higher level features, like buffers.

Still, I end up doing better in an IDE, because most of my editing is of code, and an IDE understands the code I am writing far better than emacs or vi could.