Right. You identified the prime characteristic for the CUI crowd: no context switching. Though Wordstar purportedly was superior for text manipulation.
Robert J. Sawyer wrote an article [1] on why he still uses it. Made me want to learn it, but I realize that if I'm going to put effort into learning a tool, I'd likely want it to be Emacs instead. (I currently use Scrivener.)
Emacs is worth it from a “creating an ideal environment” perspective, but it is a nightmare from a “stay focused” one. Tweaking your editor becomes very easy and very distracting.
I use emacs and org-mode all day long, and never tweak it unless there's a really strong reason. My goal is to keep it as close to vanilla as possible.
I use emacs as well, and regularly get distracted tweaking it. Maybe the temptation to tweak isn't present for you - but is for a lot of other people. I think it's a personality trait.
