I can't think of a week in the last 5 years that I haven't seen at least one vim article on HN. It's just part of the zeitgeist here. I do find that as I keep getting better at using it though, the articles no longer really cater to me. It would be cool if more articles discussed deeper hacks than the standard "i like vim - modal editing FTW" or "use this list of plugins {bufexplorer, <language pack>, NerdTree, taglist} to make vim an IDE for $language". I think these articles are important and good for a lot of people to get the exposure, but, I would like deeper stuff too for my case :)

Keep in mind that any community or group will have a certain amount of echo-chamber quality to it, if it is growing or churning (which usually happens). The new folks need to see this stuff to understand community norms, and this is a pretty natural way for transmission of that. I work at a university, and I used to feel the same way, about how every fall we would have to go over basics yet again, but then realized that this phenomenon is how we make new grad students into regular grad students. (and I'm pretty sure the getting sick of it step is a requirement for the Ph.D.)