What gives me real hope is the insertion of vim modes into GUI editors. It lets me use languages that need IDE assistance to be practical (I'm looking at you, Scala), while still holding on to the Old Ways.

Along those lines, I'm really excited about Neovim's work to make the editor embeddable. Rather than reimplenting a fraction of Vim/Neovim, you can embed all of it.

Have you looked at https://github.com/ensime/ensime-vim ?

Neither the github page or the website say what it is.