Well, rant and occasional surprise aside, I've found evil-mode to truly be a better implementation of vi than vim itself, at least where it concerns me (as formerly a pretty advanced vim user and plugin developer, it took me some adapting to stop using all the ex vim idioms and the like.) It's faster to handle big files and execute macros, overall snappier and has a profoundly better %s///g with real time preview.

I really did start using Emacs when I started learning Clojure(/Script), though, and made it my main language and platform investment. And org-mode had been playing a part in my want of switching for a while, building up for years. I also told myself it'd be better to hack in a lisp but Elisp is so fucked up I still haven't mustered up the courage to properly learn all its old and unexpressive idiosyncracies (god, even creating a closure requires explicit verbosity!) Meanwhile I don't think I can bear VimScript anymore--since getting into Clojure my language standards have gone considerably up. As a result I do the odd hack but haven't developed more powerful plugins in a while, not in elisp nor vimscript; I'm in a psychological limbo there. Kinda hoping Guile-Emacs takes off so I can do stuff in scheme.

I tried using evil and it just messed up my brain too much. I learned emacs and vim properly and their methods of operation are now ingrained in my muscle memory, entirely separate from one another. To go back now would be like asking someone to use a mouse and keyboard to drive their car.

Thanks for the insight, much appreciated.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by 'verbosity' in this case? I just Googled and it looks like Elisp uses the same (lambda (arg) form) syntax, like CL---is this what you're referring to?

Lexical binding is a "new" feature for elisp. See:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LexicalBinding

...for some of the issues.

Would you say that emacs (with evil-mode) is significantly better than vim using ScreenShell or slimv, for clojure development?

I really didn't try Clojure on Vim, at the time Emacs seemed unambiguously like the authoritative option and it did serve as an excuse for me to jump into Emacs. For Clojure though, I find that Paredit tremendously reduces my need of vim motions. But evil-mode is great for all my prose editing needs (along with org-mode) and I do find it more robust than Vim at all the fundamental vi functionality.