after trying to learn Emacs for a couple of years I had a similar experience once I learned enough of the basics. after I started to master Emacs I could no longer go back to any other editor. I just wished I would have learned Emacs sooner instead of looking for excuses for 2 years.
Yup, I did the same thing about 14 years ago. I was steadfastly using pico (yeah, yeah, don't ask) until I finally sat down and forced myself to spend a week in emacs, and finally "got it".
And I did it all again a few years later when (no longer using terminals or other people's computers) I finally bothered to map the control key to the left of "A", meta to underneath the '/' (sadly not always consistent on PC keyboards), stopped using the non-alpha keys, and realized how nice the "weird" keybindings always were.
I was the same way in school. I also used pico for a long time, and for a while after that, I used vim, but only with the bare minimum necessary for edit, save, up, down, left, right. I finally had a teacher that required us to use Emacs, and I've never looked back.
