Your comment comes across as one who has their head stuck in the sand, frankly. Yes — the basics are a bit odd and initially off putting to novice users. I don't think many vim users are promoting vim for its learning curve, we're promoting it for its productivity in the more intricate editing. I still feel a little joy inside any time I use da' or ci( (delete around single quotes — i.e., remove this string, and cut inside parens, i.e., remove the arg list an start ending a replacement). Those commands in particular I find incredibly common, and the arcane shortcuts — while arcane — save me a lot of tedious Shift+Ctrl+arrow,arrow,arrow,arrow… in your more run of the mill editor.
And for the truly complex edits, :normal makes a boring, monotonous task faster … and more fun.
(MSVS has it's own issues: the last time I used Visual Studio, granted, it was ~7 years ago, it lacked ? in its regex syntax, and grouping was with {}, I think. Tell me that editing with a different regex syntax than what your .Net code uses is intuitive? The auto-complete was really good, though. (Though vim comes with out of the box heuristical completion that gets most of the way there.)
cool