> since vim's visual modes always extend

Certainly an interesting point! Maybe this'll be addressed better once nvim adds multiple cursors (it's on the roadmap).

Though I've never found this to be annoying, or felt I really wanted multiple cursors while doing something; maybe I'm inexperienced with using them. For complex/wide-ranging edits I usually record an edit action at a particular instance of what I wanna change as a macro and generalize that if necessary by composing it with more macros, instead of editing everywhere at once in one fell swoop. I think it's just a different way of going about it (which happens to work more intuitively for me).

> and you lose selections on going back to normal

FYI: gv restores the prior visual selection; I'm not sure if this is what you meant