I "manage my plugins" when I have nothing more productive to do and it never takes more than 5 minutes. Vundle and its automatic management may be seen by its users as a productivity enhancer but the reality is that the productivity gain is actually very small.

Vundle, Pathogen, VAM, etc. are very useful (I use Pathogen) but for other things, orthogonal to productivity: keeping your `~/.vim/` tidy, simplifying install/uninstall…

Unless you spent countless hours a day installing/uninstalling plugins, which I hope is not the case.

Yes, we all install plugins to solve problems. What exactly are these problems would also be useful to know when we read posts like this. In this specific instance, opening a file or navigating the file system is something that can be done very easily and quickly with built-in commands or built-in plugins:

    :e **/foo<Tab>
    :Ex

It just so happens that the vast majority of Vim-related blog posts are lists of plugins dressed by enthusiastic semi-beginners (I know how it feels and I don't criticize that feeling and the urge to share it) who often barely know the basics. When helpless new users look around for information they only get superficial stuff and the "Install NERDTree" mantra repeated over and over while what they need is authoritative information and useful tricks for using vanilla Vim.

And yes, it may sound rude, but most of the problems of the world could be avoided if people just RTFM.

I like the warning you added to the top of your article and congratulations for dropping that bullshit Janus.