> refactoring (select a variable name, select all instances of that name, change),

regex works great for me in vim

> 1 time pre-processing data

I use regex for this most of the time, and macros if it's more complicated. I think macros are actually quite a bit more powerful than multiple cursors because you can apply the same set of transformations between files (and without needing to match against a particular word or pattern).

That makes sense. I use RubyMine's refactoring to rename all instances of a variable, but if that weren't available multi-cursor would certainly be a lot easier than copy-pasting.