Switching from vim to emacs was a virtually seamless experience and a complete no-brainer... yet I put it off for years. Years before I finally took the plunge, I knew I eventually would. Vimscript is awful and although elisp isn't a great lisp dialect, it doesn't have to be great to be better than vimscript (which is abominable.) I shouldn't have put off the switch for so long. In retrospect I'm not even sure why I put it off for so long.
> If I were working on Emacs, my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time-
With emacsclient, I don't think this is relevant. Concern about startup time certainly wasn't part of the reason why I put off switching for so long.
You put off learning Emacs partly because you learned Vim first. But why did you learn Vim first? Because people around you were already using Vim. Because Vim came preinstalled. Because Vim was quicker and easier to just edit a file.
Startup performance isn't about persuading fence sitters. It's about becoming the default, the option people pick without even knowing why they picked it.
In truth when I was a teenager I sat down with vim and emacs one afternoon and tried both. At the end of that day I chose vim, because I preferred the default bindings of vim. Nobody around me used either, nobody around me programmed at all, but I had read online that the pros used or or the other.
> If I were working on Emacs, my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time-
With emacsclient, I don't think this is relevant. Concern about startup time certainly wasn't part of the reason why I put off switching for so long.