That vim dumps you into a screen with no guidance and where your keypresses appear to do nothing (or apparently random things!) would be the problem here. It would take very little to have it say "type :help to learn how to use this program" in the bottom of the screen when it starts up. It's also confusing because many Linux systems are set up by default to launch vim whenever another application requests an editor, even if the user uses something they are more comfortable with otherwise. This could be resolved by asking "which editor do you want to use?" instead of dumping the user into a randomly selected editor.

You can build powerful systems without confusing people who often never intended to wind up in your program in the first place. You can even build them to show people how to use them.