Depending on how you define "sane" it can be months. Vim is said to be a programming language for text editing - I wouldn't expect anything less of a complexity from a thing like this. I recently learned Emacs and it took me two months - that short because I already went through the process with vim some years ago - to learn it and configure it to my liking. My Emacs config counts 983 lines with comments and whitespaces removed[1]. My .vimrc was shorter, but mainly because I dislike vimscript and like Lisps.

[1] cat .emacs.d/config/*.el | egrep -v '^$' | egrep -v '^;;' | wc -l

That's only the first time. It's a completely different paradigm and you have to learn it. Once you've learnt it this entire list is a non-issue. Not only that - configure it as you want, then take that config with you to every other machine that you ever use - surely that's worth the effort.

That's not the problem. The problem is some people's assumption that they can pick up Vim just like any other editor and use it right away.

It takes time to be productive with Vim. There's no way to get around that.

It starts with a sane configuration, the problem is when you want to add loads of features you have to spend a small amount of time adding them. The alternative is to have a fucking insane amount of functionality present to begin with because everyone wants something slightly different.