That's exactly the same viewpoint I have.

How do you like Helix as a starting point? Currently, I'm having Claude write a little personal text editor with CodeEditTextView as a starting point and now that I saw your comment I suddenly realized I mostly like using a modal editor and only didn't do it here because I'm moving from a webpage (where Vimium style stuff never appealed to me). Good hint that. I wonder if neovim's server mode will be helpful to me.

From UX perspective modal editing is all I care about and I just got used to Helix. And it's very feature complete and relatively stable, so hacking it and maintaining bunch of patches is not a lot of churn in practice.