I'm not saying this is bad advice, but as a vim expert I have a hard time with emulations messing up my flow. IMO if you want to use emacs it is worth taking the hit and switching to a whole new set of keybindings.
I 'switched' to evil mode about 2ish years ago and ported my entire .vimrc and all its quirks with no problem. There are some rough edges with some other modes not supporting evil by default where hjkl muscle memory can trigger functionality unexpectedly, but that is usually easy to fix. The only other thing you have to watch for is that emacs is overly strick about C-a b vs C-a C-b and this manifests painfully when using C-w l and friends to switch buffers. The easiest fix is just to bind C-w C-l as well so that you don't have to slow down your typing.
I have actually found it hard to go back to vim because emacs has been much easier to customize and many of the features I use routinely are no longer in my vim config.
Would you mind elaborating more about which particular emulations mess up your flow?
I use Emacs very casually, mainly just for writing in org mode with Evil, and have toyed with the idea of switching to it completely. But, if you could talk about the figurative holes you fell into as a vim expert that could help inform my decision down the road.
It has been a while since I honestly tried evil-mode, but there were a few categories of issues I remember:
1. Search/replace behavior - Not that it is better or worse, just that it is different.
2. Misc. ex commands. I don't remember specifics.
3. Plugin specific commands. Not really fair to bring up, but still part of my muscle memory.
Using vim keybindings with emacs has been way better then any other vim keybindings thing I've tried for other programs. And if there's anything missing you can customize it.
