The culture around both of those editors is offputting. There are way too many people who substitute an emotional attachment to their esoteric tool interface for an actual reason to use something, and then they evangelize. It's basically religious.
Using a tool only due to emotional attachment is bad engineering, but so is -not- using a tool because some are emotionally attached to it. Choose or discard tools based on their utility and merits. As engineers we don't have the luxury of ignoring an entire path of tool evaluation simply because a many people are annoyingly vocal about the value they see in it.
I use vim because I like the keybindings, speed, the ability to use it on any of the hundreds of systems I work on, across many different operating systems be it remote over ssh or locally. I need the ability to easily fix/modify it to meet my specific workflow needs and share my configuration across all my systems. (Example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lrvick/dotvim/master/scree... )
Being open source I know I can always use this tool how I like and port it to any future platform I care about.
Closed source GUI-only editors only work for a very limited number of use cases, and only for a period of time that the current maintainers feel like maintaining them. Vim and Emacs will remain maintained so long as there are enough people using them that care to port and patch. 20+ years is a good track record and thousands of contributors have come and gone over that time.
If the (single) author of Sublime gets hit by a bus in a few years, the chance of it ever being ported to a future version of the operating system you are currently using is now nonexistant. Worse, the years of you becoming efficient with that tool will now be for nothing.
Closed source is fine for entertainment, but when it comes to anything you rely on and are going to spend a lot of your time investing in... you should always have the control to take over the codebase yourself if needed.
Perhaps it appears that way to outsiders. But I have found that within editor communities the culture is mostly about getting things done.
Besides, why should the emotional attachment of some users reflect badly on the community as a whole?
For example this study argues that devoted fans of the Apple Macintosh appear to be like members of a religious cult [1]. But is that a good reason for someone to avoid Apple products?
