"""I say this as a person that knows vim well."""
These two phrases don't go together.
Would you say you knew how to play a piano well if you were still consciously thinking about where each note was?
If you don't use vim to the level that it's subconscious and "in your fingers" it might not seem all that useful...
Fwiw "ag" and the various plugins around it make your use case pretty trivial.
Sure they do. VIM has such a culture of minimizing keystrokes that pretty much anything you do, you start wondering if you could have done it with fewer key strokes, or if you could have done it better. It's hard NOT to think that way because that's the entire point of getting into VIM in the first place.
http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/william_s_bergman/in...
(because it's about minimizing keystrokes in vim!).
Edit: I didn't know about vim golf, which is a slightly different take on a similar phenomenon.
Fluency comes after learning it well enough that you aren't thinking about it anymore.
Yes you should occasionally reevaluate where you are on that scale but I don't see that as what you are saying.
Enjoy your ide if you have it figured out to your satisfaction.
Cheers