How much of an investment is to learn vimscript? I want to write some plugins but I also don't really feel like learning it. Wish I could use different langs but from what I'm hearing I'd have to learn vimscript anyway.
The hard part is learning the API, which takes a lot of googling. Start off writing some helper functions for your own use and turn them into plugins later.
A few great resources I found after having googled a ton around was [0] and [1]. If you are very familiar with vim (I'm not really a power user tbh), then all the commands you use with : are supported in vim script. Meaning opening a split in your script is, well, just split.
[0] http://ricostacruz.com/cheatsheets/vimscript.html
[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-vim-script-1/