Is multiline editing popular/useful? Thus far, the only occasions I've seen it shown is when someone is demonstrating it.
I don't like using tons of plugins but multi cursor with with selective invocation like the ctrl-d of sublime etc was the main thing I missed when moving to vim. (I use visual block mode too but it's not the same thing).
It's pretty easy in vim once you learn how to use visual block mode. That or using Sed to replace text in a selection or the entire file.
That's all you need - you don't need a whole program that collects all of your information.