Really not interested in getting into editor wars here. Sorry. :-/
With the widespread availability of raster graphics, I wonder how often people actually have to use a character-cell terminal for editing text. (I appreciate the coolness factor.)
I use a terminal text editor when I'm doing something in the terminal, need to do a quick edit and don't want to have to switch away from the terminal into a GUI editor. For me that's typically commit messages and not-too-complex config files. In such cases using a terminal editor is simply more convenient...
Seems odd to teach old needlessly difficult software just because you had to learn it.