On mediawiki.org , clicking Section edit links already fires up VE for me. When this behavior started I quickly figured out that if I really wanted old-style editing, right-click & choose Open Link in New Tab or middle-click would do what I want. Knowing that VE is the future I didn't even think of complaining.
I dunno if this "Open in new tab" workaround is a bug. If you fix it, I'll probably look at the hyperlink for an indication of the section number and manually add §ion=7 to the Edit source URL. If it bothers me enough I'll seek a gadget or piece of JS to fix it (as Quim Gil suggests), while continuing to give VE a fair try. My point is as long as there's some workaround to get to wiki editing of section links it will satisfy a large group of experienced editors who are *supportive* of improving MediaWiki and are willing to adapt to new defaults instead of vehemently complaining. I suspect we might be the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority of experienced editors.
Cheers,
-- =S Page software engineer on E3