That's pithy but a characterisation that misses many important aspects.
Bram's been developing Vim for 30 years [0]. Just think about that for a second. An open source project that's been running for longer than the age of probably 50% of the readership on hackers news. It's ways of working and values have been developed over a long period of time.
Vim favours being available on multiple platforms, alignment with Unix tradition and stability:
> Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. (https://www.vim.org/about.php)
Neovim is built by people who value fullness of features, who see multi-platform as 'legacy platforms' and are happy to break backwards compatiblity for the value of making something more complete by contemporary standards.
The easiest summary is - Bram's comparison is Vi, Neovim teams' comparison is VS Code.
I love many of the NeoVim's new features and capabilities.
But, I think it's possible to like Neovim while also understanding the positive value of Vim and why their approach is different. There's something in the human condition about turning everything into a winner and loser, a hero or a villain - but it's just not true.
As a project that's been running for 30 years Bram and that community have an approach that they are comfortable with. There's a way of working, and a rhythm to the project that has worked over the long-term. They're evaluation of changes is against their own internal values - those values are different to the people that are working on Neovim. Personally, to me 30 years of effort and contribution to providing something totally free is unbelievable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)
