Not saying they don't exist, but I don't think I've ever encountered a vim instance where that didn't happen.

I recall many frustrating days in college when I first learned vim but not enough to configure it (or was to lazy to). The arrow keys inserted control characters in edit mode on the basic Linux install I had at the time and on the school's computers (circa 2000-2004). It was annoying. It turned me off to vim for a while, but emacs and I were a better fit anyways.

Yeah, maybe I'm just weird, but modal editing is kind of a pain unless you do it every day. It's just a little too arcane for making a quick edit to a file in /etc. It's probably even more natural for me having grown up in the shadow of the University of Washington, so PINE was the popular email client and PICO was it's editor.

Don't get me wrong, I've watched Vim power users do amazing things in that editor but those people are not me and I can't find a good reason to climb that particular mountain.

arrows work in vim as default since 2000???