It won so many adopters because it was simple and pretty. The advanced features are great, but TM won because it didn't have Emacs/Vim learning curve, and it mostly just worked.
Is 2 hours a considerably "steep learning curve" for the thing you are going to look at and interact with 8 hours/day, 40 days/week, for the rest of your engineering career?
Also, at the point that you first pick up an editor like Vim, you have no idea whether it's going to work for you, so the 8 hours/day is a furphy.
I use vim daily and it's my editor of choice (so far, at least), but it needs commitment and time to get use to the modal system and to be used without feeling that is absolutely broken. After 8 years I'm sure it feels very natural (as it feels now to me), but I sure remember that it took me time to get use to it. It's not just reading a tutorial...