Modal editors have the huge advantage to touch typists that you can navigate around the screen without taking your hands off the home row. My wrists only hurt when I'm doing stuff that requires me to move my hand off the keyboard and onto the mouse or arrow keys and back constantly1
there used to be a "modal like" way to write #Japanese on cell #phones before : The first letter you hit was a conson let's say K, and then, and then the next key you would hit would have the role of a conson. (Having two conson in a row is impossible in Japanese)
Modes can be dangerous if you forget what mode you're in, but very little cannot usually easily be recovered. Also, modal interaction, while counter-intuitive makes it easy to use very powerful commands. I am roughly Vim's age and I still see modal interaction as the only way of having real power on a keyboard.
aware multi-modal - touch and speech are aware of each other and intersect

unaware multi-modal - touch and speech are unaware of each other and conflict
#emacs #vim

stackoverflow.com/a/31124

Why are there so few modal-editors that aren't vi*?

Pretty much every other editor that isn't a vi descendant (vim, cream, vi-emu) seems to use the emacs shortcuts (ctrl+w to delete back a word and so on)

^{Stack Overflow}