>Dumbing things down is not an option as it requires serious users to bend over and take it anally from the editor while they try to perform anything more complex than typing characters into a text file.
Your premise that everything is either *all stupid* or *all complex* fails. In modern editors you can save in one keystroke (^S), likewise for exiting (M-F4); with editors such as Ultraedit, KWrite you can also do more advanced tasks while still retaining that same simplicity.
Let's do a quick comparision:
Saving in vi:
<esc>:w (three characters)
Saving in emacs
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-W (four characters)
Saving in abiword, notepad, kedit, kwrite, etc
Ctrl-s (two characters)
Quitting in vi
<esc>:q (3 characters)
Quitting in emacs
Ctrl-X Ctrl-C (4 characters)
Quitting in most other, modern GUI editors
M-F4
While building on (as opposed to throwing away) that simplicity, modern word processing programs and IDEs also offer more complex functions, and any decent program will allow you to define you own keybindings or create macros for often-used tasks.