I don't know what you mean by "one-off task", of course you can save the commands you use most often. I think part of mastering vim is thinking about movements

I don't know what you mean by "one-off task", of course you can save the commands you use most often. I think part of mastering vim is thinking about movements and commands in a more generalizable way, then macros are just second nature. Macros just make all the insane one-off editing tasks everyone runs into trivial. This morning I needed to byteswap all the hex constants in several huge tables, I don't know if I've ever needed to do this before, and probably won't need to ever again. I did it in vim with a macro that took me seconds (something like qa2xlpj3hq1000@a). Sure, this isn't for everyone, but one day you are going to want a minor variation on the operation your magic button performs... and I think you're going to have to take a swig of coffee and just sit there doing it manually!