Movement:
Moving around is a hassle at first, most people insist using arrows instead of hjkl, but even thous are slow and tedious. You get much more mileage from using w, e and b for jumping between words, but even thous get slow after a while and recently I've been using the f and t commands to Find and jump To places (characters) I want to. Obviously it requires some time to learn and I am by no means perfect, but I dare to say it is faster than scrolling and pointing with a mouse.
Plugins:
I don't really see how installing plugins is tedious, you just slap one of the managers into your ~/.vim/autoload (I use pathogen) and then rest you just clone to ~/.vim/bundle. Vim doesn't have build in plugin browser and one click install, like Atom does, but at least to me that is not a problem. Maybe it's because I don't use that many plugins, who knows.
Tabs/buffers:
These do take some time to get used to, but I wouldn't say they are any more clunky than your average editors tabs.
Memorizing commands:
At first it seems like insurmountable task since almost every key is a command and as you mentioned most plugins have their own commands, but truth is you don't need most of them to get started and as you use the tool (or at least thats how it was with me) you Google how to do something tedious faster and there is almost always a better method. As for the "file tree view", I don't know what that plugin is, but I can guess and I used something called NERDTree at start, but vim's build in :find command is pretty powerful at just finding what you need and now I use fzf which makes finding files even faster.
Over all I get why you might dislike vim even without trying it (since most vim users constantly push their shitty editor (and dont get me wrong vim is shit, but it's least shit editor I've yet found)), but I suggest you try using it on a side project and see if you like it, don't install any plugins at first just try reading the documentation and making changes to the config as you go along. I bet you'd be surprised how much you'd enjoy it.