There's something to that, yes, that a lot of things become second-nature (e.g. once you learn Vim, when you're in Nano on an unfamiliar machine, you start finding yourself accidentally typing Esc-:w to try to save a file).

There's also something about "this is totally unfamiliar and not at all incremental upon what I know." I was vigorously against vim after trying to do it many times, eventually I found out a base set that allowed me to learn incrementally, now it's not so bad. The big thing is to totally forget all of these people who are saying "vim is like an awesome language for text editing." Maybe it is, but that's an awful sales pitch. This person wants to spend a few minutes editing source code, not spend a year learning a new language.

The minimal starter set for Vim is something like:

    # From Command Mode #
    dd     | deletes a line
    .      | repeat whatever you just did, for example pressing I, 
             then the delete key 4 times, then Esc is one command
             which dedents a space-indented line by 4; now you
             can go down a block hitting . at each line to 
             dedent it.
    i      | switch to edit mode at present cursor
    I      | edit at beginning of line.
    A      | edit at end of line.
    u      | undo
    Ctrl-r | redo
    

From there probably the next thing I would teach people is brace jumping with %, regex-jumping with /, visual-lines mode shift-V and either cutting with d or copying with y, then pasting with shift-P. Finally macros with qp ... q ... @p. After that, maybe dealing with multiple buffers. Just let people use the arrow keys to navigate, don't get too religious about the home row or letter repetitions like d5d.

I think that's a basic skillset that will let you say "okay, my thesis advisor is making me put two spaces after each period that's not an abbreviation in this document, what editor should I use for that? Well I want to step through everything just to make sure, but let's just use Vim where I know I can write "fix this one and then jump to the next period" as a macro, and interleave that with some basic navigation when it's not right."