...how seriously to take your recommendation...

Not seriously at all. I never got around to highly customizing vim or emacs or anything like that. I have used whatever was at hand in the past: vi, pico, notepad, MS Visual Studio 6 and Open Perl IDE. I wouldn't try to convince someone who loves their editor to leave it for Eclipse+EPIC (at least not on my recommendation).

I tried out Eclipse because I wasn't using any particular editor.