I honestly think if more people gave emacs a chance they'd find it's exactly what they've always wanted.
emacs and vim have always had self imposed limitations by requiring that all of the core features work on a remote terminal (with mouse being an after-thought/optional extra). Sublime, VS Code, and even Visual Studio have no such limitation so I'll keep using them.
Each to their own of course. :)
Also, both emacs and vim have non-terminal versions. I would imagine those are more mouse-friendly, but I have not tried them.
[1] For years my workstation mouse was a trackball in a drawer
https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors
I don't use them because if I want to change text in multiple places, you can highlight the lines where you want to change it, for example the current line to line 57 would be: V57G.
Then to change `foo` to `bar` type: :s/foo/bar/g and the replacements will take place within the selected range. If you only want to change some of them add a c on the end of the command.
Column selections: `ctrl-v`.
I'm not sure what kind of live feedback you mean, but Vim gives multiple forms of feedback, depending on what plugins are installed.
The mouse is probably an afterthought because using the mouse is significantly slower than the keyboard commands.
When you have enough commands in muscle memory and use it as designed, it's almost like a telepathic communication with the computer.
Everyone has their own preferences though.
And in case you're not aware, you can install gvim to give vim somewhat of a GUI.
As a developer I'm not sitting down an typing constantly like some bad Hollywood "hacker" montage, or a court reporter. So preemptively optimizing a tiny subset of my workflow really doesn't offer much value.
Contrast that with something like Chrome Debugging for VS Code[0] or GitLens[1] that are fitting into what I actually spend a lot of time doing, therefore improving productivity. If my typing was 50% faster my overall productivity would be maybe 5% better, because that just isn't a bottleneck.
I feel like the vim/emacs crowd experiences professional programming VERY differently to anywhere I've worked. Myself nor any of my colleagues are just type-type-type. I spend more time reading and writing OneNote documentation files (specs, etc) than I do writing code. I spend more time in meetings than I do writing code. I spend more time debugging and testing than I do writing code.
[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/12/20/chrome-debugg...
It's the unglorious part of our work, the part that we're paid far too much for, since you can't quite ask a secretary to do it.
So, it's seldomly acknowledged that we do this stuff, but it's not even particularly uncommon with database and GUI code often being mostly that.
There you are mostly bottlenecked by your typing speed, not by how much you need to think.
As for your argument that typing speed is not the most important thing about a text editor, that it's its tooling instead: Emacs has a thousand features beside text editing, while vim has a thousand extensions to add those features. I'm sure, if you actually used one of these text editors you'd just as well have anecdotes of things you feel are important which you don't have on the other platforms.
Off-topic: OneNote is probably going the way of the Dodo by the way. Microsoft Office 2019 and onwards will not ship with it. You can comtinue to use OneNote 2016 for a while still, but it's eventually not going to get security patches anymore.
Microsoft does provide what they consider a continuation as a UWP app, but as it stands you can't use that without uploading all your notes to Microsoft's servers, so hardly usable in a company with any sort of sense for confidentiality and data protection.
For me, at least, learning vim has the same kind of benefit. It's not about getting characters into the editor faster, it's about being able to manipulate text without having to think about it.
It took a little bit of setup and a whole lot of learning, but I'm already reaping the rewards. Text editing is straight up faster, Org mode is really cool, and Magit is probably one of the best git clients I've used.
Also, for a piece of software that came from the 70's (?), the Mac port of Emacs actually looks and feels pretty modern.
It does still have some quirks owing to its provenance but if you turn off the toolbars and choose a decent font it looks as good as anything else. Emacs is a lifelong journey. It's like playing a musical instrument. The possibilities are endless and you'll never reach the end but whatever stage you're at you'll still have fun using it.