I dunno, seems reasonable to me that we might have nice things without requiring everyone to use emacs. (And for those who do use emacs, I guess you're ahead of the curve?)

On the other hand, it seems reasonable that we should be able to have nice things without giving up our editors. I know I’ve been spoiled by Kakoune’s cursors, but this feels like a tool that should work by spawning $EDITOR in the middle of its execution (or perhaps just having two phases and a control file). I don’t know if that’s actually possible with the current capabilities of $EDITORs (which are not Emacs). I just feel, in the darkest hour of the night which I spend reflecting on UIs, like it should be.

Nonsense, lots of people are doing text editors.