My personal experience as someone who started with vim and than switched to emacs:

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