I have to disagree with #1, vim normal mode is emphatically not about navigation, it's about editing. It's basically a command grammar where navigation (motions in vim parlance) can be combined with the various commands.

The key observation behind its design is that programmers and sysadmins spend much more time editing than entering new text, and therefore it is asinine that 40 of the keys on the keyboard are permanently dedicated to typing out literals when there are very obvious editing operations that give you a lot more leverage.