I'm lost; why wouldn't vim be suitable in this case?
Because some of us use Emacs on a daily basis and don't have vi keys seared into our brains. I know the basics, just for these kind of cases, but given the choice I'd use mg any day over vi.
shouldn't your config management system be doing this ;P
I don't even know if there is an IDE to edit a crontab file. I mean, it's not even remotely difficult.
I think his point is that on most systems, except localhost, you shouldn't be touching the config files with an editor. Those files should be managed by an automated system (config management system). Such as chef, puppet, ansible, salt, cfengine & the lot.