[werg]

Oh yes, that is certainly what we do. And there's nothing wrong about that. We are definitely in the business of building tools for professionals, i.e. a bit of a learning curve is not the issue. The "professional hazing process" isn't necessarily bad. What I would say is that there is some (maybe a lot of) potential value that vi cannot develop simply due to the very reduced form factor that it has. I believe this never really has come to the fore because most programming languages are designed in a fairly limited way. I.e. they don't really take into account that they are a User Interface.

As positive examples I would point out the kind of interactive editing mode that you can find in dependently typed programming languages. I believe e.g. Idris has a pretty cool Emacs mode.