If you learn Vim like anything else - slowly and starting with the basics - it's not more complicated than figuring out any IDE. And once you know the basics you are fully in control how deep you want to go.

Personally I have found Vim more approachable than IDEs actually. It doesn't throw all those overloaded toolbars at you according to some one-size-fits-all principle. For me it went so far that last year I actually did a Java project in Vim instead of an IDE for the first time, because the latter had grown to be so frustrating to use.