Not just different preferences, but a different way of thinking about using computers. I naturally evolved from using notepad > edit plus > notepad++ > vim. I had simply reached the point where I was tired of moving with a mouse, arrow keys, shift-arrow keys, dialog menus, watching coworkers gather to talk about how broken Eclipse is that day, regex not being more prominent. I was tired of "you can't do that."
The number of keystrokes used is irrelevant because this is the optimal generalization of how to perform an action on some text. As in I could turn my screen off, open this file, perform the action an save the file and be sure of the result. So I could map a single key delete four words in vim, but why would anyone do that? It's easier to think "I want to delete four words" and have my fingers do that from muscle memory. That's exactly what it feels like to use ci" when I want to "change inside double quotes" - I tell my editor what I want to do and it moves the cursor for me without needing to peck at the arrow keys N times.
I decided to accept nothing less than tools that are reliable and work exactly the same way every day until I want to change something. I don't care about following someone else's idea of what features or keybindings should be in my text editor; instead I started from a blank slate and added what I wanted. This has the side effect of making it incredibly obvious when I change something that causes the editor to behave in a way that I don't expect or to slow down.