if vs code felt as responsive as emacs or vim, i'd use it. I don't really care about 'start-up time', and if I did then using emacsclient or some such with a daemon takes care of that issue entirely.

there is no convenient way for me to 'plug-in' the responsiveness of something like vim or emacs into vs code.

to be clear : responsiveness is things like opening a context menu of any kind, switching contexts, text drawing and blanking ; just things that add up to create a quick feeling piece of software. vs code/atom/whatever and other 'larger' graphic-heavy text editors feel slow.