Your complaint would make sense if all of my text editing consisted of sequential writing in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. But then, I wouldn't need a text

Your complaint would make sense if all of my text editing consisted of sequential writing in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. But then, I wouldn't need a text editor at all since I can do that with cat. In reality, I rarely ever do that kind of writing. 99% of the time I am working on some existing document, such as a source code file, and so I need an editor optimized for random access editing. Vim is that editor. As a long time vim user I am in normal mode all of the time. When I sit down at a vim session I haven't touched in a while I press escape a few times to make sure I'm in normal mode. Then while I'm editing I am continuously typing various motion and change commands, some of which enter insert mode, and then quickly making the change before escaping back to normal mode. Because I am in normal mode all the time (or perhaps vice versa), I spend most of my time jumping around the file and reading what is already there. Extremely rarely am I looking at a completely empty file where the only useful thing to do is start inserting text. And even then I am often typing some command to pull in text from another file or as the result of a bash command.