I have been using Vim as my primary editor for many years and am happy with it. People I know who use developer editors are split between Vim and Emacs. Neovim usage is minimal. Why? It is an honest question. I see developers of the editor happy, which is a good thing, but IMO to get more users NV must show why it is better from a user perspective -- have several demos on the powerful things easily achieved with NV t…
This is anecdotal speculation, but I imagine that most Vim users are in a similar boat. I talk to so many lifelong Vim users who have never even heard of "pathogen" or other plugin management systems. I'm pretty sure that heavy plugin users are the minority.
Most people who seem excited about NeoVim (or even talk about it at all), fall into three categories:
1) Heavy plugin users, who want plugins with some feature not well-supported by Vim.
2) Developers who would like to embed Vim within their own applications, but find the classic Vim codebase or license unsuitable for this.
3) "Ideologues". People who don't like Bram Moolenaar. People who wish he would have accepted a pull request that he declined or ignored. People who wish he would release Vim more frequently, make it more trendy, or bloat it up with this or that new feature. People who just don't like the way that the Vim project is run, ideologically speaking. (EDIT: i.e. the brigade crowd who's downvoting every comment that isn't unqualified praise and support for NeoVim.)
So like I said, I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of Vim users do not fall into category #1. And the other two categories are tiny subsets of that first one. So to turn the question around... why WOULD people go out of their way to abandon the default, and flock to something else which might drift away from compatibility over time?