Practical Vim the book is a good place to start. You should be spending as much time learning Vim as using Vim for about the first two years of your Vim usage.
- you haven't answered my question. Like, at all.
- I don't quite like the 'would be better off in an IDE' part.
That said, at this point I'll better see what I can find about these oh-so-essential features and I might even add them to my routine/workflow (so far, I still don't know why though...).
Edit: As expected, the help page doesn't explain why I should care about those. q: and q/ are nothing I ever missed, :normal is weird and I cannot imagine what it is used for. Basically my whole reason to jump on this thread "Okay, now I don't know these. Why are they useful?" is absolutely still relevant. Reading the documentation isn't enough. I .. won't buy a book at this point.
In fact, I think I only type `q:` as a typo when I'm trying to `:q[uit]` :p