Apropos of nothing in particular: a good way of spotting vim hipsters is that they don't know what ; does, because they never used t or f. They do however very carefully use hjkl to move around, because the cursor keys are for squares ;)
But it is frustrating otherwise.
Unlike others in this thread, though, I do find the original behavior of ";" useful occasionally. I bind that behavior to ";;", which is still quite fast to type whenever I do need it.
Remove two `a' characters of the current line:
fax;.
Note: no mode change necessary
Also, line editing in /bin/{,k,ba}sh -o vi without `ftFT;,' is a pain.