In my experience, it's better to spend a long time playing with Vim, and then look at plugins. There's a lot that Vim does out of the box without any additional tools, and spending time learning to use (some) of it without trying to make it more like another editor is the only way you're going to get better at it. Learn about buffers and how to manage them before using BufExplorer. Learn the (many) movement keys, and insertion, append, replace, substitue, change, options before you use Surround.

It may sound odd, but learn to use the tool by itself before you try and plugin anything else, otherwise you'll just get lost.