Bravo man, I tried to make the switch from vim to emacs evil and failed horribly. I would eventually throw emacs into a state where it wasn't in any of the evil modes, then bash my keyboard with C-X C-C. Is it possible to use emacs+evil without knowing emacs inside and out?

Emacs with evil, without a doubt, runs so much smoother while editing large projects. The biggest point is that asynchronous operations are a lot easier to perform in emacs. You can get close to it with plugins like vim-dispatch or vimproc, but they always felt like a second class solution to me.

You get cool stuff like search/replace preview and super smooth async operations in the background (like on the fly linting with flycheck).

In the end, I'm still using vim. Unite with vimproc is "good enough" for me. For me, the only real place where async operation is a huge problem is with file search operations. Every few months I try to use emacs for a day, maybe next time it will stick :)