My vim muscle memory has paid off more for me than my emacs muscle memory. Emacs was the better editor, though. Anything that doesn't have Vimscript is an automatic winner IMO.

I use ^a to go to the beginning of a line and ^e to go to the end nearly everywhere. Many Emacs keystrokes are so pervasive that they're not often thought of as Emacs keystrokes.

Aren't they actually readline keystrokes, and emacs is "readline-aware"?

I'm pretty sure the navigation shortcuts date back to when Emacs was literally just a set of TECO macros, and GNU Readline adopted them

Evil is a tried-and-true Vim implementation that doesn't use Vimscript!