It's an investment and the payback is considerable. I can start up emacs in any environment and it works the same. I could go back 20 years and use emacs without trouble.

Also I can move around in emacs and do stuff with macros that has saved me a lot of time. And emacs rarely has problems, unlike visual studio, which crashes occasionally and is permanently sending my dual-core to 100% of both.

Emacs refactoring, heh, not so good... So I use both, do main editing in emacs.

But you're not going to go back 20 years. No one's going to come along with a time machine and send you back to the year 2000. And, unlike vi, emacs isn't part of the POSIX standard, so your production servers aren't going to have emacs preinstalled. If you're a new programmer, with zero experience, why would you bother learning a program that is going to make you less productive than your peers and isn't going to give you any advantages when you're debugging in production? What exactly is the payoff to this "investment"?

In this case, it isn't about money, but proficiency.

Proficiency? Proficiency in what? Proficiency in learning a completely irrelevant language to spend two months getting up to the same level everyone else gets to in two weeks?

Slower to learn, but with a higher cap, and more likely to endure for four more decades than a given learn-in-two-weeks gui program.