I took the dive into Vim about a year ago. I was at the stage where I'd become proficient with some command-line tools in Linux, but I didn't yet have an editor I could use fluently from the command line. I tried out both Vim and Emacs, and found Vim to be slightly easier to grok, plus my pinkie got kind of sore from holding down the Ctrl key in Emacs.

I changed my default editor at work to be Vim, and started doing all my dev work at home through Vim. I started off just using the arrow keys to move and just using insert mode to edit text the normal way. Each day I tried to add one new command to my repertoire; I learned about how to structure vim commands (c-change i-in w-word, etc.) and move using hjkl and the higher order movement commands like w and b. Now I can maneuver my way around vim quite confidently, and although when I started off I was much slower in Vim than other editors, I now find that Vim is just as fast or faster for most tasks, particularly where I can make use of Macros.

At the moment I still have to get my head around markers and a few other concepts, but I've definitely become proficient enough for it to be worth the effort and time invested so far.

My tips for anyone learning to use vim for everyday development would be some common tab commands: :tabnew <path> to open a file in a new tab, :tab sball to show all currently open buffers in separate tabs, gt and gT to jump to the next/previous tabs.