You are right and wrong. I paired with a lot of juniors, and especially in the beginning stage of your career it is important to write as fast as your thoughts are. And in the same way, to be able to jump directly to the place where you want to change something. I belong to the Emacs tribe, and macros were really so impressive while doing my Masters for a lot of people, mass-changing classes definition through "programming" without really thinking. Still, mastery in macros impressed people and saved projects through really fast iterations, it's faster than Excel or Python. It's that a lot of times, you have a thought and want to execute on it, seeing the result immediately. What I don't like about Emacs and Vim is the lack of great debugger support. I would love a world where unit testing, functional data structures and static typing obliterate debugging, but we're not there yet. What I encountered is, that actually real mastery of tools made or broke projects. The 80/20 rule is not what I observed in reality. It is really long tails all the way.