I currently use Emacs (with Vim keybindings) as my main editor, after oscillating between Emacs and Vim for quite a while. I think the biggest disadvantage Emacs has compared to Vim is its out-of-the-box experience. For me at least, I would say that learning to love Emacs takes a lot of effort, far more than it should. I think folks tend to mentally categorize Vim in the same basket, but I think Emacs is far, far worse at onboarding its users.
The Vim out-of-the-box experience is not exactly great (crucial features like vim-surround have to be installed as a plugin, for instance, in the terminal version there's a lot of delay on some commands, etc). But while learning the unfamiliar keybindings initially takes effort, the huge speed advantage of modal editing becomes apparent after just a few days of sticking with it, and it becomes second nature surprisingly fast, to the point where you just stop considering editors which don't have decent Vim emulation. So while I wouldn't exactly describe Vim as accessible, it gets its core idea across fairly quickly.
By comparison (and also in absolute terms), the Emacs out-of-the-box experience is horribly bad, it seems to make no effort to wow its first time users. It stubbornly sticks to a keybindings scheme that is unfamiliar to a modern audience and which, crucially, unlike Vim's keybindings offers no substantial productivity boost. All the documentation even still calls the Alt key "Meta". So you spend multiple days getting used to Emacs' keybindings scheme, only to end up roughly where you started (not much faster than before). At this point it's easy to start feeling like learning Emacs is not worth it: you've just spent days learning without your productivity increasing, and you just have to take people's word for it that, no, really, it'll get better. The main selling point of Emacs is its extendability. But this point is lost on users who aren't already convinced that they love and want to use your editor. You have to provide a good out-of-the-box experience still.
The Vim out-of-the-box experience is not exactly great (crucial features like vim-surround have to be installed as a plugin, for instance, in the terminal version there's a lot of delay on some commands, etc). But while learning the unfamiliar keybindings initially takes effort, the huge speed advantage of modal editing becomes apparent after just a few days of sticking with it, and it becomes second nature surprisingly fast, to the point where you just stop considering editors which don't have decent Vim emulation. So while I wouldn't exactly describe Vim as accessible, it gets its core idea across fairly quickly.
By comparison (and also in absolute terms), the Emacs out-of-the-box experience is horribly bad, it seems to make no effort to wow its first time users. It stubbornly sticks to a keybindings scheme that is unfamiliar to a modern audience and which, crucially, unlike Vim's keybindings offers no substantial productivity boost. All the documentation even still calls the Alt key "Meta". So you spend multiple days getting used to Emacs' keybindings scheme, only to end up roughly where you started (not much faster than before). At this point it's easy to start feeling like learning Emacs is not worth it: you've just spent days learning without your productivity increasing, and you just have to take people's word for it that, no, really, it'll get better. The main selling point of Emacs is its extendability. But this point is lost on users who aren't already convinced that they love and want to use your editor. You have to provide a good out-of-the-box experience still.