I've been an emacs user for the last year or so. Previously, I'd used Sublime Text, which I think is a fantastic editor. I loved its speed and especially its simplicity -- pretty much everything just works right out of the box, configuration is managed through JSON instead of some obscure imperative language, etc. But ultimately I really needed two things: the ability to use it over SSH, and the ability to run a terminal inside of it. (ST has a third party shell plugin but it's frankly terrible). So much of my work involves either SSHing into a machine to do work, or rapidly alternating between a shell and an editor. The frustration of having to fumble my way through emacs or vim every time I SSH'd into a remote machine, or having to hackily arrange windows side-by-side so that I could get ST next to a terminal, ultimately became too much and I decided to just start using Emacs.
At this point, I'm reasonably proficient at emacs. From the sound of it, I'm nowhere at the level of the author of this article. But at least I'm comfortable with the essentials -- copy/paste, find/replace, nagivation, etc, and I can easily accomplish the two things I missed from ST (though I'm getting increasingly fed up with the shortcomings of ansi-term, and I might just switch to using tmux).
Unfortunately, what I've lost is the simplicity. I find emacs lisp to be a horrible language. I find it ironic that a platform built on a functional language like lisp manages to produce some of the most complex and incomprehensible compositions of state, as different packages interact with each other in a non-deterministic way, or one package will simply hijack the editor and freeze/crash it, or refuse to let you enter input because a plugin can't parse your buffer, etc. Have some weird behavior in your editor? How can you tell which plugin is causing it? No one knows. It's really quite unpleasant at times. Maybe vim would be better, or maybe not, but learning vim would mean a period of being woefully unproductive or frustrated.
It's irritating that the only choices for terminal-based editors are either embarrassingly under-featured (nano, pico, etc) or require a ton of learning to become proficient in (emacs, vim). On the other hand, there are several GUI-based editors which are powerful and easy, but none of them work in a terminal, nor do they provide a terminal emulator of their own. :(