>Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that.

Which is still nearly useless without knowing of lots of Emacs arcana.

We're talking terminal (not GUI) editors here. If I fire emacs on macOS there's no menu displayed by default. If I connect remotely on a Debian machine, the menu is there but mouse reporting is not working. The help, if started by itself, vanishes at the first keypress (on macOS), which makes it really easy to skip the C-x C-c part, and uses the emacs-only convention of C- instead of the well known ^ for control (although it's explained right there), thus doubly easy to miss. I can see how newcomers would be turned away from it.

I was once a "true beginner", having been forced to use basic terminal commands in school and having decided to get a raspberry pi and shove Raspbian on it for laughs. There is no GUI over ssh from Windows unless you already know what you're doing. In that context, accidentally opening emacs is bewildering :)

That's basically my question. What's the market for people who want a terminal based programmers editor in late 2017 who don't already use Vim or Emacs?