It's easy to spend hours tweaking the perfect setup, but it's a never ending task. Also the more you tweak it the easier it breaks at each upgrade, and the more you rely on it and miss it when you're not on your personal computer. For this reason I'm reluctant to add mappings such as inoremap jk <Esc> to my .vimrc for fear of getting used to it.
That's basically your age-old argument, which is fine. However, there's nothing wrong with other people optimizing their productivity even further. Personally, I appreciate people who try to tune their editing. It should be a more precise task with less effort. I don't use vim much these days but people are doing a great job in promoting precision:
Vim - precision editing at the speed of thought https://vimeo.com/53144573
But writing, for me, is different. My primary progress blocker for writing is not writing. And spending time tweaking technology is so tempting, and so fun, and very much not writing.
I am, in fact, doing right now not writing, so I should get back to it. (Plain MacVim, using Latex as the markup.)