そう、A Tale of Five EditorsとThe Right Size for an Editorですな。
vimの設計が設計根本から間違っていること、普段我々が感じている不満が
はっきりと書かれているよ。

By contrast, vi looks rather bloated and flabby. There are hundreds of commands,
many of them duplicative.

Evidently something about editors tends to push them in the direction
of increasing complexity. In the case of vi, that something is not
hard to identify; it's the desire for convenience.

There is thus little prospect that the codebase-size ratio between
Emacs and vi will improve in favor of vi; indeed, it seems likely to get worse.