There's no bad technology, just bad documentation. In fact, vi is an incredibly powerful, speedy and productive editor. It's my main editor, in Linux and Windows. If there's one thing I know how to do, it's make the complex simple. But I digress.
Documentation is only the symptom.
The root cause is elitism. It's a philosophy that if the reader needs to see examples or experiment in order to learn the product, they don't deserve to work with your operating system. Banish them to the Redmond penal colony. If we want Linux to survive, we need to welcome newbies with open arms. We need to recognize the fact that many of them are not as intelligent as the yggdrasil pioneers.