I must say I disagree. Having some control over the tools is certainly of benefit. Yet my experience certainly was, that the greatest people I met were sometimes surprisingly slow with the tools they used.

This is because what really seems to matter is their prespective at things and what decisions they take then. Sure knowing their tools inside out will make them faster, but it is not the KEY thing of why you would take them over every other person. Unless of course your job very focused on these tools (e.g. hand crafting etc) and even there knowledge often trumps tools.

Tools are just tools. If you look at a Cameraperson at a movie set, you will see it even more so. A young guy who knows that 50k€ Arri Alexa inside out might be ending up making worse images than that old fart who just knows where to put it and how to press record. That young guy would be a perfect camera assistant tho. Making pictures is not the camera, just like writing code is not the editor.

If I manage to get to the same thing as you, it doesn't matter if I use notepad.exe, a typewriter or pen and paper, unless it takes me ten times as long. But nearly none of the time consuming problems I had with code were ever due to the fact that my editor slowed me down, but rather that I wasn't aware of parts of my code.

I aknowledge however that people are different, and maybe it could be distracting if your editor is to slow depending on the type of person you are. I also like smooth workflows where things don't get in my way also in vim, but there is a threshold above which it bascially won't matter anymore.