> We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies

That's exactly it. The modern metrics for anything to be successful is the number of people using it, even if they are completely useless because they did not put any effort into learning the basics. In this case, it would be essentially "ESC", "i" and ":wq". But that's waaaay too hard.

No wonder everybody ships a full rootfs in a container for every single executable they make... if learning how to quit vim is too hard, who would want to learn about packaging?