I never started with Vimium (was using an even less known one), also in part because I find smooth scrolling disorienting. Also on Tridactyl now, once someone on here showed me the hintfiltermode, hintchars, and hintnames settings to get the old Vimperator behavior (which I also find so much better than any current defaults):

  set hintfiltermode vimperator-reflow
  set hintchars 1234567890
  set hintnames numeric

Lets you type the words in links, and the hints filter down to only matches. If you go all the way to 1 match it automatically picks it, but as the hints filter down the numeric labels also reset - so there are no gaps betweeen the numbers and it's almost always between 1 and 5 to get the link I want.