

since interface has been designed to be as unfriendly as possible
No, it hasn’t.
It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn’t have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift. There aren’t that many ways to program a visual text editor when those are your constraints.
That it’s more productive once you know it is a side-effect.





















At the time vi was originally developed, such keyboards did exist (on terminals). That’s the reason it works the way it does.