actually they aren't. At least for me. I mean, C-p I won't be pressing with one hand, I use both. I have pretty long slim fingers. I am touch typist too, so yeah sometimes my pink is used a little bit more than I would like, but I didn't feel pain or discomfort. Vim is far far better in that term.
I use emacs with evil, my approach for this is to use vim keybindings for everything related to text editing and emacs keybindings for everything else.(With just some minor exceptions).
Unless you want to go the whole full exotic keyboards route and/or go crazy with remaps, emacs keys are just too painful.