If you intend to do a lot of customization to your editor, or expect IDE-like features, I feel that emacs is the superior choice.
elisp is a OK scripting language. Rather quickly I could read and understand the internals of emacs packages (and of some of the emacs internals itself!), despite having basically no experience with lisp. Self-documentation and explorability is truly incredible.
I never really looked into VimL, but my understanding is that it is really not as good.
I still prefer vim bindings, so I use evil-mode on my "vanilla" emacs and vim bindings in spacemacs (well, "hybrid" bindings to be exact).
So my personal take:
- vim for sysadmin, being able to run a fast minimal editor behaving the same on multiple machines
- emacs for development, where having a "tailor-made" editor with lot of config/customization is important
Have you tried TRAMP? It's not just something that lets you have your Emacs config on remote machines: it brings the remote filesystem to your machine. (It's a little like sshfs except more powerful and much more convenient.)
There's highly recommended pre-configured packages like Spacemacs or Doom-Emacs that ship with vi-key support enabled by default, allowing you to keep much of your muscle memory.