Before I finished reading your first sentence, I knew you are a Kakoune evangelist.
object-action may be a more natural order in some languages. I use a language which permits both. So I think you're overstating how much of a deal it is. That said, Kakoune has controversial design choices in a couple of areas:
* no explicit select mode means not only you're selecting text all the time as you move your cursor (which can be annoying). More importantly, it means there are very few keys left on the keyboard for user defined commands. This comes up all the time on the forums whenever someone asks for a new function or an unused leader key. "Fewer modes" is not a virtue in itself, because modes have other benefits like taking the weight off keyboard.
* Shell as a scripting language. Really. It's completely awful for maintainability.
* I continue to argue that multi-cursors are a poor man's search&replace. It doesn't show off-screen matches by default, so you don't know if you're matching anything off-screen or not.
There are Kakoune features I like very much, for example improved integration with commandline utilities. You can more easily use them to process the text inside editor.
object-action may be a more natural order in some languages. I use a language which permits both. So I think you're overstating how much of a deal it is. That said, Kakoune has controversial design choices in a couple of areas:
There are Kakoune features I like very much, for example improved integration with commandline utilities. You can more easily use them to process the text inside editor.