> I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.

This sounds like the micro text editor. I've committed a few features to it and use it daily:

https://github.com/zyedidia/micro

You might be interested in checking it out.