Maybe it's just my personal workflow, but I rarely feel the need to go forward/back by word. Beginning or end of line are common and useful, but otherwise if I want to get to a specific word/line that I'm looking at, I will mostly do Ctrl+s to search and basically jump there immediately or in one or two hops (or Ctrl+r to search backwards). It's hard to convey, but it feels less like "navigating" or "moving" around a 2-dimensional grid of text and instead just teleporting to exactly where I want.