Earlier quoted context omitted.
In term sof new stuff that's true, but there are a lot of things that modern plugins provide that obsolete the traditional way of doing things. For instance, people using EasyMotion never have to worry about counting how many words ahead they're moving and then typing c69w or whatever. And likewise, there are some things that everybody should have in their .vimrc, like incremental search, and it doesn't make sense to…
There can absolutely be improvement on some default Vim settings. 'hlsearch' should definetly be the default, and I think it is a crime that 'hidden' isn't. There are easily dozens of other examples. However I think these should be made defaults in Vim itself, not in some grabbag of stuff we hand new users on their way in. I think it is important that every Vim user knows exactly what ways their setup differs from th…
Not really. I often use (incremental) search just to move around, and I don't want the highlight to distract me, especially with a really common pattern. I would consider using it if the highlight disappeared immediately after the search is over, but as far as I know there is no such setting, so I only enable it from time to time.
This just proves that it's really hard to agree on defaults.