I use VIM as well to edit lisp and it works wonderfully. I, too, wanted to scream back in time at this guy :)

I do think that I'm probably missing some nice things that SLIME has that I don't currently take advantage of, because I usually just treat my lisp programs much like other programming languages: I write all my code in an editor (VIM), and then I hop over to a terminal and just run "sbcl --load file.lisp". The interactive piece is probably nice, and may be a little faster, but for what I'm doing, this is is all I need. Besides, this is pretty much how I program in every other programming language anyway.