Bah... Nano FTW.
Now listen here, n00b...
In all seriousness I used pico/nano for 20 years before I needed to do massive amounts of regular expression parsing, typically as a result of taking network device mgmt console output and working with it. I planned a network switch lifecycle project spending around $10,000,000 across more than 700 telecom closets where I had to gather information on total port usage, PoE usage, PoE type, etc, where the existing switching topology had been haphazardly upgraded or supplemented.
vi made it very easy to take the captures that my scripts collected, process those into CSVs, and import them into spreadsheets in a way that let me save probably $3,000,000 compared to if we had done what a consultant recommended, which would have been replacing like with like without consideration for usage, density existing port count, etc. I could never have done that regular expression work in pico/nano.
Admittedly I've never used EMACS, but every time I heard about this-or-that feature added to it, it reminded me of 4DOS and the integration of a bunch of crap into something that didn't need it. I'd heard people say of EMACS, "It's a great operating system, but a ****ty editor."