The goal of a new text editor shouldn't be to make things better for people who are already experts on an existing platform. It should be to make it better for beginners on the new editor (because initially, everyone is) and better for them when they become experts.
Saying "I'm an expert at vi, and other editors don't work as well for me" is a pretty meaningless statement. Of course they don't. It's like saying "I speak English, and I find speaking Spanish really hard, so English must be the best."
I think this is a case of not being able to have your cake and eat it too; you can make something easier to use, but it usually comes as a compromise to more expert users because you have to simplify the interface, remove functionality, reduce configuration options, etc. Conversely, adding more power will usually mean increasing the difficulty for beginners; if you require that users are comfortable with using a semi-programming language to write configuration files, you get more options and more power than you could via a simple and straightforward gui.
In the end I don't think either approach is better, just different. To address your first statement, I think editors can either choose to become better for experts in a particular domain, or they can choose to be easier to learn for beginners, or some compromise between the two. I have yet to see an application that manages to do both.
I agree that someone's subjective opinion of editors other than the one(s) they use is not very useful, but i don't think that was the point of the post you replied to. He was simply stating what I stated above; an app that is good for a beginner is not necessarily the best for an expert, and in the end you have to find some compromise between the two.
EDIT:
For the record, I think vim has a pretty good learning curve; vimtutor is great, and you only really need to know the most basic parts of modal switching for gvim to be used like any other text editor. Once you gain some mastery of things like movement command, macros, markers, etc. you can really start to accelerate your workflow. I'm not one of those people that started using hjkl from day one.
Saying "I'm an expert at vi, and other editors don't work as well for me" is a pretty meaningless statement. Of course they don't. It's like saying "I speak English, and I find speaking Spanish really hard, so English must be the best."