vim is great, but most of its great features are at the end of a very difficult (but necessary) learning curve. The learning curve for developing plugins is even steeper (and unnecessarily so).
In contrast, most people can pick up and use textmate instantly. They can alter the extensions easily, since everything is done in a sane script environment (python/ruby). They can also share/alter/manage their extensions more easily without causing conflicts. Pathogen/vundle are recent vim plugins that finally make this easier for vimmers.
In a sense, textmate changed the nature of what an editor was about. I think extensions are a large part of an editor's value now. ST2, vim, and others are now following textmate's approach, and I admit, they're doing a better job of it than textmate. However, you still have to give credit to the originator.
You've never used Emacs, have you?
I don't speak Ruby so I've never been able to alter much of anything in TextMate beside creating/customizing snippets in my 4 years of heavy usage (user ID in the lower 4 digits).
However, picking up vimscript for my small needs was relatively easy.
I'm talking about light weight editors that support light weight scripting in a number of different languages. I consider emacs to be more IDE-like. That's admittedly a weak distinction though.
If, on the other hand, these extensions were written in a number of scripting languages rather than Emacs Lisp, I'd need to maintain a like number of scripting language runtimes in each guest OS. Given the amount of code I write in Emacs pales in comparison to the amount of contributed third-party code I use, the fact that I have to write it in Emacs Lisp is a vanishingly small price to pay. Besides that, for lightweight scripting at least, I actually like Emacs Lisp.
No, I haven't worked with vimscript. What does it have to do with anything?
Vim/vi is a brilliant piece of editor software, with a solid concept (an editing language, the dual modes etc). And it is in continuous use for 30+ years now. Does anybody disagree with that?
Now,vimscript being crap, or even it being totally absent, would not change those facts. In fact, most of the decades of vi/m using by hundreds of thousands of programmers have been without vimscript existing at all.
Btw, please don't use the word "troll" out of context. I made an argument. Reply or ignore it, but don't use conversation killing words like "troll".