This is mostly how I work as well, and has the advantage that when I need to poke around on servers and appliances on which I do not have my vim setup, I can still use a lot of my regular “tricks” because they are shell-based.

Sure, sure, I do miss tpope’s surround and repeat plugins, but I have shell muscle memory and am happy(ish).

IMHO, of course, YMMV. :-)