Why nano is still better than Vi? Pine or not ?

One of the classic debates amongst linux geeks is whether Vi is better than emacs and vice versa. I have used all three and personally I like nano. The reason is not functionality richness or any other performance metric but simply the fact that I had been using PICO (Pine Composer) for a long long time roughly five years. Pico was first developed in University of Washington and came along side the famous email program pine (Program for Internet News and Email). The skills developed while using pine to quickly check email and reply via pico have been instrumental in developing this skill set. I performed my data structures, operating systems and networking lab coding in the same pico editor and this lead to my constant hookup with pico. GNU's clone for pico is nano and this does not let me use vi and /or emacs. Even though vi is supremely more effective and productive than nano but history is on nano's side.