I think vanilla VI (basically just modal editing in general) empowers the user enough to make it worth knowing. I'm pretty damn proficient editing code in a pro

I think vanilla VI (basically just modal editing in general) empowers the user enough to make it worth knowing. I'm pretty damn proficient editing code in a project (that I know granted) with hundreds of files using standard VI when i ssh to a VM or AWS machine etc. Still more proficient than people using an IDE locally without VI modal editing :p