not sure about "better", but i'm curious what was crippling back then? using them nowadays is a breeze and you get practically full functionality at your disposal.
:maappend chars to end of line( * )Jf:D
Then ^N to execute it, I think.
( * ) I don't remember how we quoted ESC
When I saw that emacs could record macros while I was typing that immediately sold me the editor. Multibuffer and multifile were nice features too.