It's mostly to do with the various plugins that I use. I can pretty quickly get to syntax highlighting and editing with vim (read: instantly), but the other tools that I like integrating into my editing are where I hit a wall every time. Even with that I could sync everything via git or dropbox or whatever else that I wanted to do. It's just the fact that I have to dig through my mental notes to get it working. I also don't specifically have a VIM haskell environment to clone. (I don't have a sublime haskell environment to clone, either)

I'm not that it's necessarily excessively complicated; it's just not particularly straight forward, either. This could just be a failing on my part, but I haven't set up a vim environment in about a year, and there were enough confusing parts to do a little head scratching to get haskell plugins working to make me grab something else for now. With ST2, it's been about the same amount of time since I've set it up and only took around ten minutes to finish (that's with plugins to integrate HLint, compilation, a repl, type checking, etc).

Again, keep in mind that I said this was a very narrow use-case/situation. I'm not arguing that VIM is more difficult to set up for any case outside of the exact one I said. I'm not saying it is or isn't a generalizable point. I'd really have to do more digging to find out. What I am saying is that in this situation ST2 was easier to setup.

I'm also not arguing against VIM because of setup time/difficulties. Setting up a coding environment should be a relatively small chunk of the total time you spend using it to code. I'm just noting a relevant experience I had last night.