I don't disagree, but some of the great parts about vim are its self-sufficiency and reliability. It's awful when your editor won't open because it's trying to

I don't disagree, but some of the great parts about vim are its self-sufficiency and reliability. It's awful when your editor won't open because it's trying to write a log message to a drive that was disconnected or checking for updates but the network is extremely congested. One could make a command to check some central registry (or, what the hell, maybe a .vimrc blockchain) but typing that command would be about as much work as the curl/wget/git solutions proposed elsewhere.