I suspect the reason he was having a hard time, was because he was insisting on replicating some existing workflow structured around other tools.

If you just want to use vim as a simple editor, it doesn't seem very hard. I mean, I don't really remember a difficult learning curve.

I still only use vim that way. I let my window manager handle the complex stuff, like how to arrange windows and then how to have multiple sets of window arrangements with different things in them (i.e. tabs).