Though trying to run Emacs like vi is a pitfall in itself. Clunking around the terminal summoning Emacs to edit files is really not a particularly effective way to use it. Emacs is not vi, and using Emacs like Emacs makes more sense. Most users explore your filesystem and spawn and monitor processes from within Emacs, rather than from a terminal.

Not that you can't work that way (and using `emacsclient` is the way to do it), but you're losing out by trying to shoe-horn usage patterns familiar from other toolchains onto Emacs. Emacs is not a text editor, it's a text manipulation platform that includes an editor - a number of editors in fact, including a vim clone.

I think running daemon mode has significant advantages. You can have frames running on multiple virtual desktops for different uses. You can also step away from a buffer, and return to it, maybe from some other location on a different computer.