* Ease of learning. Any power user learning Vim now (or in the last 20+ years) is coming to it with a headful of useful, versatile conventions and shortcuts that completely don't work. God knows how many times I interrupted my flow by reflexively hitting Ctrl-Z to undo, or Ctrl-V to paste, or Shift-Arrow to highlight, or, hell, just trying to type something normally. It doesn't even sync with other command line conventions. That "Type :quit<enter> to exit Vim" message appears when you hit Ctrl-C: Vim knows what you're trying to do, but it won't do it unless you ask nicely. As far as I can tell, there's no substantial advantage to Vim's mappings except that people who already know Vim can keep using them.
Which ties into:
* Discoverability. This is less about Vim in particular and more about command-line apps in general, but still. In a GUI app, if you want to do something but don't know how, you can often find it quickly by clicking around menus, and in the process you may find something else useful that you didn't know about. On the command line, you pretty much have to tab out and search for help, whether in Google or the man pages. (And of course learning to navigate command-line help is a whole different skill in itself.
Spacemacs solves the problem of discoverability by displaying all modal keybindings currently available, if you started typing a modal command sequence, but haven't completed a command yet. The additional bonus here is that once you internalise these commands, they stay the same while you execute them much faster. In mouse-centered environments, one would first learn how to do an action using a mouse and after he felt the need to be faster, he'd need to learn the key combo from scratch (for the sake of the argument, let's ignore the few common conventions like F1, cut/copy/paste and undo/redo).
On the other hand, I agree that starting out with CLI is a bit painful. IMO, the middle ground taken by Spacemacs really should be researched (and used) mode.
* Ease of learning. Any power user learning Vim now (or in the last 20+ years) is coming to it with a headful of useful, versatile conventions and shortcuts that completely don't work. God knows how many times I interrupted my flow by reflexively hitting Ctrl-Z to undo, or Ctrl-V to paste, or Shift-Arrow to highlight, or, hell, just trying to type something normally. It doesn't even sync with other command line conventions. That "Type :quit<enter> to exit Vim" message appears when you hit Ctrl-C: Vim knows what you're trying to do, but it won't do it unless you ask nicely. As far as I can tell, there's no substantial advantage to Vim's mappings except that people who already know Vim can keep using them.
Which ties into:
* Discoverability. This is less about Vim in particular and more about command-line apps in general, but still. In a GUI app, if you want to do something but don't know how, you can often find it quickly by clicking around menus, and in the process you may find something else useful that you didn't know about. On the command line, you pretty much have to tab out and search for help, whether in Google or the man pages. (And of course learning to navigate command-line help is a whole different skill in itself.