It’s not “designed to be as unfriendly as possible”, it’s designed to be exactly what you configure it to be, that’s why I love it. Every keymap, every screen position, every worflow, the way it searches through lines and files names, everything was configured by me, so whenever I do something in my editor it always make absolute sense for me, because it was literally made for me.
If you get me to someone else’s neovim config I would probably be absolutely lost because it’s a very unique experience for each person, some people like to bloat it out with plugins others like to keep it bare minimum and so on.
One biggest lie abput vim is the productivity, it doesn’t make you that much faster in comparison to any other editor if you take the time to learn the keymaps from them, the real strong point of neovim is having an editor that is absolutely tailor made for you in a way you cannot achieve in OOB editors.
Nowadays there many neovim distros that come setup with everything and you can learn as you go, but definitely not user-friendly still and the distros kind kill the point for me personally.
I totally understand prefering users friendly tools, but I think that fornevery software there is always some degree of granularity that makes it user unfriendly.
You asked about what the hype about vim was, I tell you: it’s the granularity of the configuration it’s 100% not it’s user friendliness.