First of all, I should state more clearly that I am describing my view of a dream editor rather than what I think should be done right in the Vim community. That editor will keep the core functionality of Vim, and probably the core code base, but it will have to rewrite the interface from scratch, with Lua being chosen as the only embedding language.

I am not too unhappy with the current situation by any means, but it's precisely because I have a biased relationship with Vim that I feel uneasy seeing how civilized it is to write extensions for other editors.

That said, while my dream editor probably won't be Vim 8.0, it may be in the form of a brand new fork. I do think that sounds practical.

About your first concern, historically speaking, programmers as a community don't seem to mind porting things from one platform to another. It's actually quite a fun thing to do, especially if the new platform is polishedly designed.

Your second point is interesting. I admit it's something I haven't thought of and only sounds obvious now that you say it. I would say my dream editor will have to sacrifice the command mode altogether. If there is something you type in the command mode very often, you write it as a Lua function and bind to a key.