I have trouble understanding Vim as well. It seems to be good at code editing, where I find that I'm not bottlenecked there. I'm bottlenecked at my ability to plan and think about programs.

Once I have either a plan or comprehension of a program, I move at lightspeed, and typing becomes a small proportion of software production time. When editing an unknown codebase, it becomes even more imperative to have comprehension + plan before making an edit.

Also, since its my ability to comprehend and plan that is so strained, I'm not sympathetic to Vim's lack of anything like intellisense, or cross-file grammar and type awareness + autocomplete.