It took (still takes) a lot of time to learn Vim. At first I used it as notepad with syntax-highlighting with auto-indent. That is, I immediately entered insert-mode and kept in there for as long as I could. But slowly I've started to learn myself how to truly use Vim. Nowadays I try and exit insert mode as quickly as possible (sometimes after typing just one or two letters).
Every once in a while I stop and reflect on things I do very often, look up ways to do them faster and then try and train those ways to be a habit. I learned most of these things from Bram Moolenaar's presentation "Seven habits of effective editing" (http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.pdf and http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078) most of this talk probably holds for emacs too.
Examples: when I need to rewrite a function arguments nowadays I just type "ci(" which does Change Inner parenthesis, it deletes all text between the enclosing parenthesis and puts me in insert mode to start typing. If I need to move more then 5 lines down I use incremental search instead of arrows/hjkl to move around. If I need to move to the end of a line I use $ (goto end of line) or A (append after end of line). If I need to go to the middle I'll use other shortcuts.
Vim has billions of ways to move around and select text for editing. Learning to use those relevant to your way of working is crucial if you want Vim effectively instead of annoying form of non-modal editor.
As for making Vim useful to you, I don't think anyone can tell you how to do this. You need to make it fit your style of working. Which means, trying, figuring out what bothers you and steal what works from others. Most of these example .vimrc's that people post do not include comments on what the options do, which makes this hard. I commented mine but it is rather sparse and I don't have a place to dump it at the moment to show you, unfortunately.