As a vim user (sample size one) I’m not tempted to try it due to differences, especially:

> Kakoune’s grammar is object followed by verb, combined with instantaneous feedback [in vim, it’s verb followed by object]

> vi treats moving around and selecting an object as two different things. Kakoune unifies that, moving is selecting. w does not just go to the next word, it selects from current position to the next word

(source: http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html )

The increased interactivity seems nice but the loss of backwards compatibility and having to relearn and retrain basic commands seems not worth it to me.

Hard to speak for everybody, but I think a common opinion is that it's a neat project that has some pluses and minuses and doesn't seem to be worth the effort to switch to.

I don’t know if anyone can speak for the whole community. Personally, I use vim for a similar reason that I use Postgres. It’s open source and well-tested. The rough edges are extremely well known, and relatively polished or padded.

And, if a feature is desirable enough, I know it’ll end up as a vim feature sooner or later. Like JSONB, timescaledb, etc. for PG.

Kakoune looks like it has some cool features! They’ll probably end up in Vim (or nvim) eventually.

Seems good, but the vast amount of neovim plugins I use makes a switch very unlikely.