What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. I did start to looking into all the ways to customize it, but at that point, I couldn't really see much benefit over just using an IDE.
But that's just me.
So you not customize vim either?
If you don't, you're missing out 99.999% of the greatness of both editors and doing yourself a huge disservice.
It's like being a carpenter and limiting yourself to only ever using a screwdriver.
No, and I have a specific reason - I ssh into remote boxes a lot, and I want the editor to work more or less the same wherever and whenever I use it. I guess I could customize vi to be a multi-purpose IDE but... that's what I have IntelliJ for.
Simply put, IDE in the IDEA sense is not the only end goal. Such that that straw man is obnoxious.
Now, it is perfectly fine to just not want to. Such that I am not saying you should reconsider. Just don't be too proud of that reasoning.
But the more you use it, the more you're missing out by just using vanilla vi or vim... and I hesitate to mention them in the same sentence because even vanilla vim is thousands of times more powerful than vi.
Vim's true power, however, lies in its customization and plugins. You're really missing out by restricting yourself this way.
Even more amusing, I'm fairly certain I had more customization in vim before I decided I wanted to learn lisp. What ultimately killed my customization in all things, was I felt like I was customizing on top of a very shaky foundation. Emacs/vim are stable enough, of course. But building/packaging software is basically a giant playground.
Being able to work with `emacs -q` is also important to me for extending Emacs. It's easy to partially roll back a change if I break something in my config, and I can test out new elisp code against base Emacs.
"But what if you end up somewhere where you can't do this?" - well, when it happens, I guess I will figure something out! But I've had no problems so far, and I've been doing this a while.
tmbp ~/.emacs.d % git log | tail -n 1
Date: Sat Feb 23 23:30:41 2008 +0000
My config currently works with Windows, macOS and Linux, terminal or GUI, and with any Emacs from 26 to 29, and it behaves about the same in all cases. This didn't take much effort! - though each untested combination have a bad habit of requiring 5-10 minutes of fiddling about.
I don't really use Emacs for the editor! It's more because it's a very configurable language runtime/vm with an editor interface.
And org-mode is great too.