I have used emacs for the past ~12 years, before that I used vim for a couple of years. IMHO, both editors have their strong points.
Vi has the advantage that you can learn the basics in an hour or so, and from there on out it's mostly about training your muscle memory. You do a lot of stuff with very few keystrokes.
Emacs, of course, is mostly about extending and customizing. Therefore, emacs requires a larger up-front investment of time, before you get to the point where that pays off. Once it does, it is awesome, but I can understand that people tend to choose an editor that lets them be productive faster.
There might be more to it - I never did much customizing when using any variant of vi, for example. But that was my experience when using vi and later emacs.
Vi has the advantage that you can learn the basics in an hour or so, and from there on out it's mostly about training your muscle memory. You do a lot of stuff with very few keystrokes.
Emacs, of course, is mostly about extending and customizing. Therefore, emacs requires a larger up-front investment of time, before you get to the point where that pays off. Once it does, it is awesome, but I can understand that people tend to choose an editor that lets them be productive faster.
There might be more to it - I never did much customizing when using any variant of vi, for example. But that was my experience when using vi and later emacs.