Agreed, as Vim/Neovim has risen in popularity recently it seems there is a trend of people thinking it’s only usable if you install these 57 plugins, and a large number of these users seem to have blind spots on Vim’s native capability.

The autocomplete feature is a great example of this. I do not use an autocomplete plugin at all, but rather use Vim’s native ins-completion. Combined with a language server and a lightweight LSP client (I use vim-lsc) this works beautifully.

I am excited for some of the upcoming changes in neovim however. I think the introduction of treesitter for syntax highlighting and a native LSP client will both be huge

I've checked out a build of neovim, and the native LSP is rudimentary but even in that form, very slick.

I am often torn with the same conundrum - I've been using neovim for Ocaml, and I really just like vim as an editor, but having inline linting is really really nice. But it's also really, really complex to configure, and it detracts from why I love vim so much - if I wanted an IDE, I'd be doing my Scala work over in Intellij.

I'm still contemplating whether I can get what I want with a second window a file watcher running build commands.

Agreed the treesitter is also really exciting.