At the risk of starting a flame war, please consider focusing on kakoune’s object-verb model instead of vim’s verb-object :)

See https://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html for a an explanation of the idea.

Now, I don’t really have a stake in the game here, as I use neither vim nor kakoune regularly. However, I am fairly certain that kakoune model is superior, if we ignore “human backward comparability”, and I would say that a brand-new editor has a chance to do just that.