Just watch the video of the page http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/11/screencast-custom-vim-re... to get the gist of "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger".
I tried Vim for several months and got reasonably competent. But then I timed myself doing the Vim tutorial with Vim and Gedit, and Gedit won handily. For this reason I'm convinced that Vim is only popular because using it gives you hacker cred.
I'm open to changing my mind based on solid experimental evidence, but for now I only use Vim occasionally, for the macros.
side note, everyone has to watch his https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat/ talk