I do the same and agree, though I’m trying to push myself to be a little more sophisticated. The beauty of doing it that way is that it takes no thought.
I want to select from here to just after that letter P. With hjkl and visual mode I’m already halfway there. Whenever I try something clever I always find myself thinking “is that the end of a block? Or maybe I should cut directly to P but oh there’s another one on the line above so it’s the second, need to amend” etc etc etc.
Yeah I guess the next like 25% of the value I get from vim comes from "df(" and "ct)" type commands.
Also "dd" and "p" a lot to move lines around and "J" to consolidate them.
So maybe I do use a pretty large amount of functionality pretty frequently :)
I've been thinking maybe that other comment nailed it and most of us who downplay how useful it is to really learn vim have just already done that and forgotten that it was really useful.
It really doesn't need to be this mystical uber-hacker thing to be useful.