I completely agree with your point, learning vim motions was quite painful (does it stop before or after this or that symbol, are dashes included, what about underscores, etc)

I remember seeing a vim clone that inverted motion and command, so that d4w becomes w4d, and the exact text included by the motion was highlighted right after pressing w4 . I thought this was a really neat idea! Unfortunately I cannot remember how this editor was called.