"Give us, vi[m] neophytes, steps to follow in order to understand how one might do a specific task more efficiently "
I believe this is the strawman that was being alluded to in the previous thread. Nobody is going around saying "Hey, if you don't use vim, you are producing less than I am!" Okay maybe some people do say that, but that's really not the reason people love vim.
The real reason (in my opinion, of course) has to do with flow. It's hard to explain, which is why these discussions tend to digress. But when you're in flow, or the zone, you don't want things like your text editor to get in your way. You want it to be a harmonious extension of your intentions to the machine. When you connect with vim, that is what you get. Other people might get that connection with emacs, or some other editor. But for the most part, you just don't get it with editors that don't allow a rich communication vocabulary between you and the machine.
Does flow matter on the scale of business deliverables within a project budget? Not really. It matters to the enjoyability of the creation experience that the programmers are involved in. They could probably still produce the work without that additional enjoyability, but less enjoyable work can sometimes lead to lower quality. And perhaps more importantly, it always leads to less joy.
For the past several years I've been using a keyboard that doesn't require me to move my hand away from the home row in order to manipulate the mouse cursor. There's a similarity there in that it reduces flow interruption. I've recently started learning vim because I see this same potential in it.
As for "recipes", there is a post here taken from the previous thread: http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html