I agree. When first learning Vim the learning curve is very steep for what feels like basically advanced cursor moving but with more experience it becomes a very powerful text editor. Last week another I had a 10,000 line file that was the output of a bash command with two columns and each column was in quotes. I needed to remove the first column and the quotes around the second column. There are many ways to do it but all I had to do was open up vim and type `qaA<backspace><esc>T"d0jq` and `10000@a` and cleaned it right up.
For those non-viers out there, the analogous option in non-modal editors like, say, sublime, would be `select all => split into lines` or `column selection`.
