What exactly were you missing? Could it be that you're just not used to the shortcuts that let you navigate with the cursor, remove previous word etc.?
- select to given character
- select to begging/end of the line/whole line
- select sentence/paragraph/text with the same indentation
I know some of those actions are available with multiple mouse clicks (3 clicks to select paragraph If I recall correctly) but that means you have to use mouse.Beside this ctrl+f search is not as good as / in Vim. It has no regex support for example (you can open dialog that has option to enable regex but that's more than one shortcut away).
Actions in Cua editor cannot be composed and reused, that's also an issue for me.