Why I whine vi

Mastering Vi, the very irritating text editor which is the only hope to edit a file when the system does not boot and drops you in a maintenance console, is the only way to avoid taking the circuitous route of loading a live Cd to edit the same file in GUI mode.
The frequency with which you will get dumped in the maintenance console increases exponentially depending on the number of entries in the fstab file. You will need vi in those cases to delete all but those lines relating to the boot partition and the swap partition.
A google search revealed the most elusive commands in vi - :w and :q, to save and quit respectively. During my fiddling with vi I had figured out how to insert and delete content but the saving and exiting were hard to pin. The ":" was the eel in this case.
There is a lot of history behind Vi, but the controls are unforgivably irritating. I am not sure if this is the only text editor to be used in maintenance mode. Even if it isn't, isn't it time someone made it less stressful.