This immediately made me think of the Unix philosophy (Do one thing well and provide the right way for other tools to connect to the output or pipe in input) vs the Emacs way (Operating System within an Operating System).

If we frame it this way, I think it helps us understand better the pros and cons of each, and importantly that they appeal to different type of folks depending on their use cases.

For e.g., one of the main appeals of Emacs is that it's easier to combine functionalities across mini-tools within Emacs than in Vim. However, it also means that when building one of these mini-tools, you have to have awareness of all other mini-tools in the system, and integrate with them properly, which makes the cost of building much higher vs Vim.