I grew up on Emacs, not Vi. I have to say, though, that Emacs is just kinda scary bad news when it comes to UX, in many ways. A nice glaring badness is how undo works in Emacs. There's no redo, just a twisty undo that can undo the undos until you are so freaked out and lost and confused you just give up using it ever. Anybody who is an apologist for this design doesn't score well on UX in my personal humble subjective opinionated opinion.