First, you understand how and why it is modal. Then you learn simple commands for movement and editing.

Then you learn all the meta-commands. All of these building blocks are only limited by your creativity of combining them to get what you want done. The more commands and tricks you know, the more you can slice and dice text, code, logs, whatever inside your editor (without leaving it).

I guess it's just a Unix/neckbeard thing. This is how the rest of Unix is designed, so why not the editor.