> None of the keys felt natural

The key bindings are sort of the least impactful idea behind the editor. The defaults are indeed ancient and opinionated, and don't match well with what other environments ended up adopting. They do work well for the most part if you want to take the time to learn them, though. But everyone has their own set of customizations[1], usually going along with a preferred set of physical key remappings[2]. Lots of folks use modes like Evil to get vi bindings, etc...

The point is to think hard about how you use the editor and start working on making the editor work the way you need it to. Binding fluency will fall out naturally.

[1] For myself, I'm mostly default. But for example I dislike the defaults for C-t and C-z which IMHO are footguns, and remap those to "top/end of buffer", functions I do use a lot and whose defaults are clumsy.

[2] Ctrl to the left of A, obviously. But also the key below '/' really wants to be Meta and not whatever else the manufacturer put there.