I learned Vim the hard way because I was a student at the time, I was required to do so (or Vi at least) and I had the time to invest in it. For people learning Vim on the job, the choice is either use expedient shortcuts or go back to TextMate. Better to start this way and gradually work towards the bare metal.
I suspect the reason he was having a hard time, was because he was insisting on replicating some existing workflow structured around other tools.
If you just want to use vim as a simple editor, it doesn't seem very hard. I mean, I don't really remember a difficult learning curve.
I still only use vim that way. I let my window manager handle the complex stuff, like how to arrange windows and then how to have multiple sets of window arrangements with different things in them (i.e. tabs).
Vim only seems hard because it's so profoundly different. If you persist for even one or two evenings, I'm pretty confident most Hacker News readers are easily sharp enough to be back up to their old speed in Notepad-type editors, and from there you only get faster.
You don't have to learn it at work either. I find it's helpful to make Vim the only text editor you ever use with a dark background. The visual cue seems enough to put you in "Vim mode" so you press i before you start writing. When the background is white in your whizbang C# IDE or a Hacker News comment box, you just use your old editing habits.
My love affair with Vim started after 15 minutes in `vimtutor` when the internet went out one day. o, O, A, I, dd, p, and a couple other commands were enough for me to be see the light and be productive. Everyone needs to give vimtutor a fair shot.
I learned Vim the hard way because I was a student at the time, I was required to do so (or Vi at least) and I had the time to invest in it. For people learning Vim on the job, the choice is either use expedient shortcuts or go back to TextMate. Better to start this way and gradually work towards the bare metal.