Years didn't do it but less than 40 minutes (since this was published) got you in. I'm either missing something or you haven't put your time to good use.

Try vimtutor in your terminal. It's supposed to take 30 minutes.

You'll miss a lot of things from the tutorial the first time but you can come back to it as often as needed. You also shouldn't go any further than the tutorial until everything in it makes sense. Once you're at that point, you'll be autonomous for finding new commands and a happy vim user.

I may sound mad but seriously, what's with the a-web-app-for-everything madness?