I just was mainly motivated in replying to your accusation that the original poster couldn't read -- I feel like that claim is pretty disingenuous from the get-go and if I'm being accused of it, well, I'm in good company.

I don't even know what to reply to here, but I'm in general agreeance with most of what you wrote. I just don't agree users type "vim" alone their first time, I'd wager it's following some guide/tutorial online that already has 'vim filename.txt' snuck in there. The fact that people get stuck in vim feels like something intentional to weed out people, otherwise it's a funny problem people run into on other programs like ftp, ssh, screen, even the python interactive shell. There's no unified lexicon on cli tooling, except maybe the gnu clis. It makes you appreciate good GUIs.

The real big brain approach here is to divorce the idea of vim from the command line editor and use it as a plugin in an IDE. Best of both worlds.