Being young isn't the reason for feeling it hostile. Old ones just got used to it when it was the best they had back then.
I've been using vim for 15 years or something but its default is insanely hostile that the default hotkeys aren't even funny. You'd even feel wet that you can save a file with just 2 keys under Windows in Notepad compared to 4 keys that's not exactly intuitive until your muscle remembers it or modify it to something sane. (I use a single 'space' under command mode to save.)
They're mostly old. So I guess they might be hostile to the young. I actually dislike some of the newer things like transient-mark-mode. I don't want all of that highlighting just because I have a selection region, and was quick to disable it when they enabled it to make it more "modern":
http://inversethought.com/hg/dotemacs/file/f029c55c6221/dote...