Your evaluation and thinking is entirely correct. For most mainstream development the vast majority of your time will be spent on things (debugging, testing, stepping through, reading documentation, refactoring, etc) that don't involve typing/modifying reams of text. Furthermore, if you're using languages like C++, Vim has very poor refactoring support when compared with commercial tools like Visual Assist. Having said that, you can get a decent IDE with Vim plugins - for free. You don't have to learn or use Vim's text manipulation commands at all, if you don't want to.