For commenting and uncommenting you can check the NerdCommenter plugin.
If you're running vim in a terminal, there is an option to add native clipboard support to your yank registers. If you use vim under OS X and have installed it with brew, it will be added automatically. To check whether your current vim installation has clipboard support, try running `vim --version | grep +clipboard`.
You might also find this to be helpful: http://vimcasts.org/blog/2013/11/getting-vim-with-clipboard-...
Furthermore, Vim needs to be setup and is configurable because it existed before many computer usage patterns had been standardized that we take for granted now (e.g., Vim's cut and paste system is different than any current big name operating systems).
But the very fact that Vim pre-dates these paradigms, and continues to be used despite the extra work it requires to get past that, this very fact is what makes it more likely that you'll be able to continue using it indefinitely. I.e., Vim will survive the next paradigm shift, because it survived the last one.
If you really want to be careful about investing in learning a tool, the ones you should be careful about are the ones that have not survived a paradigm shift yet.
(Photoshop is great example of a dangerous skill investment in my opinion, Photoshop takes an extraordinary amount of muscle memory to use effectively and it hasn't yet survived a paradigm shift. Those skills look poised to become completely obselete by touch-based design tools soon, 5-10 years from now. Not saying I have an better idea, because Photoshop is still probably the best tool for doing that type of work, but just plan on throwing everything you learn away.)
It is true that vim is not optimized for ease of use, especially for newcomers, and also has some problems that are considered to be solved for any decent GUI framework. But I don't see how this can affect creativity. Does carbon fiber guitar somehow magically make you more creative? Similarly, does plain old guitar made of wood hinder your creativity? I don't think so.
set clipboard=unnamed
"*y<movement>
"*p[And not all programmers use Vim or Emacs. Programmers are people, and like all people have differing opinions.]
:set nonumber
vnoremap <C-c> "+ySelect mode is used by snippet engines mostly, and you don't want this mapping to affect select mode.
Also is there one simple key combination to [un]comment a line or a selected block?
I found out how to do many simple operations with this ancient tool, what can be really fun if you have nothing else funny in life (too many people have no other sources of fun, really) - but I am still not convinced. Many operations that are a no-brainer in e.g. geany take serious planning and studying in vim - this is absurd.
I fear that we are wasting many potentially good programmers because they accept the primitivism and stupid limitations of vim as something "cool" and will never again in their lives be able to program a user-friendly GUI because their brain is "vimed out". Maybe that is one of the reasons why we still have so much really bad software.
Once I was totally impressed by programmers, they were the wizards of today, superbrains, uber-humans. Then I learned programming and understood how many uncreative and cognitively limited people are just repeating stuff that somebody else has told them, without ever asking. Basically the typical obey-guy, the perfect follower who never questions any order will be that kind of a good programmer, reading manuals and getting happy that he is able to reproduce - there is no creative moment here. Only very few of them are part of a creative elite that actually brings new ideas to life - most of them are totally dumb rat soldiers just following the orders. This is the reason why such ultra-primitive tools like vim still exist.