On the other side, it is probably the most unnecessary inflicted pain for beginners. Even after years of using vim on a daily basis, I can't get used to hjkl and still use the arrow keys. I tried a few times with different approaches, but it never lasted more than a few days. So pushing someone new to use hjkl for navigation is so unnecessary and just kills a lot of motivation for very little value.

Starting with deleting, yanking and pasting would be a lot more fun. Even navigation with gg and G plus numbers would be a lot more useful too. Like when you get an error message that is caused by line 42, you know why you want to use vim next time.