The reason there's no project-wide find and replace in vim is that vim has no concept of a project. It's designed to be one of many tools, which works really well for some workflows and not for others. #5 is the same deal -- they're limited by the design of vim, and that design doesn't fit anything like TextMate's project search.

It would drive me _crazy_ if vim saved without me telling it to.

I think a lot of people suffer needlessly trying to make vim be what they want it to be, when it never is going to meet their expectations. You'd be better off trying to get those things you find useful about vim implemented in TextMate or Sublime than the reverse.