It takes several days, not 5 years, to train your muscle memory to the point where the vim editing model is much faster for raw edits than the default editor in Sublime [1].
> typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in programming
You're right, especially if you're using a language that doesn't require a lot of boilerplate. But between the UNIX shell and the normal vim add-ons, even higher-level editing tasks, i.e. those that aren't strictly about raw editing, shouldn't give vim users trouble.
As with negatmx, I'm convinced you haven't met people who use vim properly. Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim.
[1] To obtain solid proficiency with the vim editing model, just work through the interactive vimtutor, read up on text objects, and spend a couple hours acclimating yourself to using the following motions and commands in place of hjkl (sort of but not necessarily in order of usefullness):
/ ? n N f F t T # *
gg G G (e.g. 42G)
H M L
^ 0 $ { } ( ) w W b B e E
C-f C-b C-d C-u
zt zz zb