Personally, the main reason I moved from vim to emacs is because I don't want to have to think about my editor, I want it to be pure muscle memory. I'm okay with hitting "jjjjk" to go 3 lines down rather than trying to guess that it's exactly 3 down and typing "3j". Emacs-style navigating/editing is great for this kind of error-tolerant navigation/editing. It leaves my brain mostly free to focus on whatever I'm actually coding at the time.