I think you should forget the whole "terminal based" thing. TUI text editors don't make much sense anymore. Native GUIs are much less clunky and much more discoverable.
I run emacs over ssh/tmux. I love it, emacs never shuts down, all my shells run through emacs as well. I can use any machine with my sshkey and be back to work immediately. I can increase the size of the machine, have public access to my dev box if needed. If I have a bad internet connection it doesnt matter since its just sending low bandwidth over ssh. All the real bandwidth comes from DigitalOcean and is super fast.
I would generally agree with your point, especially on the discoverability front - this is why emacs and vim have an often dreaded learning curve. But OTOH, there are also a couple of rather nice benefits to the terminal focus that I don't currently see in more GUI focused editors. It would certainly be doable to replicate them, but it seems like no one's trying currently.
So I would hold off on forgetting about the terminal until there's a viable alternative around.
Oh, and: I've seen my fair share of botched remote access solutions on the Windows side of things and would probably use any TUI editor short of ed over any IDE in those situations. At least SSH is responsive.