Thanks for this, nothing jumps out at me vis-a-vis our exchange here but since you took the time to post it I will take the time to read it.
It's not so much that I have strongly held beliefs so much as a combination of experiences that have led me to the juncture where I see most codebases as being quite unstructured, and I appreciate the benefits of a more unstructured tool for dealing with them.
The baseband for nearly everything I work with is text, pretty much all of Latin form (ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-x etc). When it comes to having to switch context between various languages and codebases, all of many and varying levels of hygene, I've come to a conclusion that I have "a particular tool" that is more suitable than most others.
Of course, when I have the luxury of working with "more structured" code, I will use the appropriate tools, but quite often the tools don't work as effectively once the code deviates from more idiomatic structure (Eclips is notably robust in this sense - but I find it can be quite clunky).
But if I have the time to learn the tools, and the tools can make the code more "fluid" to work with then I'm all for it.
In particular "Java" (which is I presume why you're linking Gosling) lends itself to this, and I did make this point above. The language itself is so robust, and the development culture seems to value best practices well enough that making the investment to learn these tools is worthwhile (EDIT - exactly in the sense that Gosling describes in TFA).
Another example in recent times has been Apple XCode when doing IOS development. The tool-chain is far too complex for me to get a "bottom up" appreciation of how it works, and the IDE in that case works just fine for me.
But these are exceptions in my 20 years or so of experience. More often than not I've a big mess to be dealing with that demands a powerful text editor.
As a younger guy I used to spend hours trying to set up my IDE and get projects to work with my tools, but I've got kids to feed now and have other stuff to do.
EDIT - read it now. Still unclear of what point you are making, unless you are erroneously assigning me to the "real men use vi" camp ... vi (or vim) has it's place, but I wouldn't really put it in the same category as Emacs, except for the fact that maybe Emacs has a terminal mode of operation. vi to me is more like windows notepad. It's always there when I need to quickly edit a configuration file.