BBEdit has a pretty strong ethos of "giving the user what they need" over what they ask for or what they want. Additionally, they obviously put a lot of thought into the interface and how it works. A lot of editors have flash, and an option and plug-in for everything, but I can't find things, the flash distracts me, etc. It feels more GNOME-ish in giving the users fewer good and well-placed options and less KDEish in haphazardly throwing in the kitchen sink somewhere in the menus and preferences if you can ever find it--but I've created a false dichotomy, because BBEdit kind of throws in the kitchen sink without ever feeling like they're just jamming in icons, menu options, and preferences incoherently--best of both worlds. In BBEdit, in addition to the logical placement and thought, they have a well-maintained PDF manual which I've gone through pretty thoroughly a few times. I like to learn software like this, RTFM, then I know what it can do. I don't like to "easter egg hunt"--pick around menus, or pick around half-baked after-thought "documentation" on the editor's website. I don't invest serious time into programs that don't seriously invest in their documentation. For me, it just makes a huge difference in learning a program and knowing what it can do.
I also just don't want to curate a mini ecosystem of plugins or extensions to accomplish my work--with varying documentation standards, interoperability, design aesthetic and sensibilities, and so forth. I want want 1st party solutions coherently integrated, full documented and integrated, and BBEdit goes this route, by and large. This isn't a magic bullet, but a different set of trade-offs that I strongly prefer, as you can find just the extension that works just right for you in a thriving ecosystem, but for me, I prefer 1st party "maximize the utility under the curve" kind of thinking, the same way Debian or a Linux distribution makes packaging uniform. Yeah, it's not compiling qmail with my custom set of patches, but as a coherent system, it delivers a lot of value.
I use BBEdit as my primary editor for everything, but I tend more toward SREish stuff than heavy development. BBEdit is really in a league of its own in what you might think of as the editor equivalent of "soft skills" like coherent design, ease-of-use, documentation, first-party features not reliant on extensions as opposed to having to use plugins and third party code (with the associated drawbacks, but you really can't match the functionality of your perfectly crafted editor via 20 carefully chosen plugins if you're willing to make an editor your lifestyle) etc. Unfortunately, in practice, that does tend to lose to "hard checkbox features" and extensibility.
This is a really great summation of BBEdit's appeal -- and also a really great summation of why it won't work for many folks. BBEdit is fairly easy to script and customize, but it's not extensible in the "add entirely new UX" fashion that Vim, Emacs, and VS Code are.
I also just don't want to curate a mini ecosystem of plugins or extensions to accomplish my work--with varying documentation standards, interoperability, design aesthetic and sensibilities, and so forth. I want want 1st party solutions coherently integrated, full documented and integrated, and BBEdit goes this route, by and large. This isn't a magic bullet, but a different set of trade-offs that I strongly prefer, as you can find just the extension that works just right for you in a thriving ecosystem, but for me, I prefer 1st party "maximize the utility under the curve" kind of thinking, the same way Debian or a Linux distribution makes packaging uniform. Yeah, it's not compiling qmail with my custom set of patches, but as a coherent system, it delivers a lot of value.
I use BBEdit as my primary editor for everything, but I tend more toward SREish stuff than heavy development. BBEdit is really in a league of its own in what you might think of as the editor equivalent of "soft skills" like coherent design, ease-of-use, documentation, first-party features not reliant on extensions as opposed to having to use plugins and third party code (with the associated drawbacks, but you really can't match the functionality of your perfectly crafted editor via 20 carefully chosen plugins if you're willing to make an editor your lifestyle) etc. Unfortunately, in practice, that does tend to lose to "hard checkbox features" and extensibility.