Good programming editors are designed with the idea that as you master the program, you become more precise in telling it what to do. When editing programs, the author usually applies several navigational schemes to interpret the text of the program: by structure, by syntactical elements, but geography of the screen.

To expand on this: examples of navigating by structure include moving by token / expression / definition. Examples of moving by syntax would be the search or "jedi" navigation (i.e. navigation where you enter a special mode requiring from you to type characters that iteratively refine your search results). Finally, simply moving up / down / left right by certain number of characters is the "screen geography" way.

There's no way to tell which method is better, because they apply better in different situations, however the "screen geography" method usually ends up being the worst, because it's the most labor-intensive and requires from the author to dedicate a lot of attention to achieve precision (i.e. move exactly N spaces to the left and then exactly M spaces down is very easy to get wrong, also, with larger N and M becomes really tedious).

Navigation by word is only slightly better than navigation by character, and often falls into the "screen geography" kind of navigation. It's easy to learn, it's quite universal and doesn't require understanding of the structure of the program or mastering better techniques (eg. "jedi jump"). That's not to say that it should be excluded from the arsenal -- quite the opposite, but a master programmer (in the sense of someone who writes programs masterfully) would be the one who's less reliant on this kind of navigation.

No. That's a wrong analogy. There's no way around having to navigate the text of the program back and forth, by character, by word, by statement, by definition and so on. This is bread and butter of people who write code.

If you complain about doing this, this is because you don't know how to perform the basic functions necessary to write code. Heuristically, this is because you are either using a bad editor or didn't learn how to use a decent one.

I.e. your complaint is more comparable to Amazon reviews coming from people who don't know how to use the product and then write something asinine, like that one about a loo brush that feels too rough when used in the capacity of toilet paper (though I believe that one was actually a joke inspired by similarly stupid but less funny reviews).