I don't know.
I do recall experimenting with FreeBSD, long ago, on an iMac G5, I found things unreasonably difficult. Generally unusable. The difficulties were not with the installer. The FreeBSD Handbook was way too dense, walls of text. I don't doubt that the texts made sense to people who were already familiar with FreeBSD, however to me: the walls were barriers to understanding problems and so, I simply abandoned FreeBSD. Abandoned for years.
My eventual switch from Mac OS X was to PC-BSD.
I can't imagine a preference for ee making diagnosis difficult.
Yeah the Handbook is incredibly detailed. Perhaps too detailed for a new user! I do think it would be good to have a 'guide for new people' just focusing on the basics coming from other operating systems*. As for the default editor the installer already asks for a default shell (sh, csh, tcsh). It would just be a case of adding an additional prompt asking which editor to use (vi, ee)? Of all the difficulties FreeBSD is facing I would think that would be the least of the issues!
In my opinion,
The keyboard layout seems clunky, on OpenBSD you type ? and it gives you a list of keymaps with a number for each one, there is no need for long scrolling and you can always drop into a shell to test the input.
I find the rest of the installer pretty easy to use? So long as one follows the default it is difficult to mess it up, the issue is when something goes wrong. I had a complaint about something to do with GEOM a while back when trying to install a few years ago out of curiosity.
However considering 'dialog' is GNU licensed, it might be an idea to drop it entirely and just use an installer that works with shell? The dialog interface is not particularly helpful really, it would still be needed by ports so could be pulled in then.
I'm not really a fan of removing things for the sake of it. A base system should be small yes, but functional, and whether that has one or three editors seems a little bit irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. A better question is, do they work?
I'm generally of the opinion that the shell is not a dirty thing and that there is not really any need for dialog or graphical interfaces, if installation is simple it will be easy to do with or without the shell, as it is on OpenBSD.
* Considering this idea further you could perhaps have a section for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, the latter would have less focus on the shell than the others since there would be assumed prior knowledge, the former two could focus on getting a functional desktop system, the latter on the subtle differences, and then the Handbook could be used for the authoritative exposition of detail on cool things like Jails.