He does have a point. Using vi derivatives does seem a tad spartan today, and I've personally never been a fan of vi, nor of emacs, but much of the community has this pseudo-elitist dichotomy set up around those two editor families.
I'm not really a fan of what passes as IDEs, either, but I generally am not attached to any particular editor and hop around them.
(The right answer to vi vs. emacs is, of course, Acme.)
There's nothing spartan about it. Vim has tons of plugins. Using it as a Javascript editor, I've got syntax highlighting, git integration, linting, code completion, and more.
I actually began using Acme a couple of months ago: it's kind of interesting how much I have accustomed to mouse-driven interaction and lack of syntax highlighting. Humans indeed are creatures of habit.
I'm not really a fan of what passes as IDEs, either, but I generally am not attached to any particular editor and hop around them.
(The right answer to vi vs. emacs is, of course, Acme.)