As someone who has invested time into vim, I can edit text files with it much quicker than I could with nano. I also suspect someone with sufficient nano experience may be as capable of coding in nano as I am in vim.

"Use the right tool for the job" is all well and good (I mean, who wants to use the _wrong_ tool for a job?) but can lead to false dichotomies around tools which are designed to solve the same fundamental problems/use cases. I would posit that the model you suggest only is applicable to people with limited experience with vim, nano (and/or emacs). I would generally recommend that someone picks one and runs with it.