Not a scientific source, but there's probably a reason behind the popularity of evil mode for emacs, and vim plugins for just about anything (yes I know emacs is often the default, but that's for practical reasons like Ctrl+a/e is easier to add than 0/$).

My pinkies love me ever since I started using vim. For me it's not the specific keybindings, but the modal editing allow more uses for the same keys depending on context and less need for modifiers.