> The proper method being "use rote memorization to learn about things which could have easily been made available via some discoverable visual mechanism"
I already said that this is a trade-off. Nobody's claiming that the vim way is the "right way" to do text editing. If you prefer a discoverable visual mechanism, you can go with it.
But some people clearly prefer to "use rote memorization" because they obviously gain something out of it.
And believe it or not, "rote memorization" is an essential part of our everyday life. Without it, you can do nothing. I don't see any harm in somebody deciding to apply it to text editing as well. Obviously thousands of people decided to do that, looking at vim's popularity.
And lastly, the memory we are talking about here is the muscle memory. You put something there once and it's done. Using vim is very much like riding a bicyle in that sense.
Would you prefer to have a bike that has labels on the pedals, brakes, gears; and prefer to go through those labels each the you need to use one of them?
Memorization allows you to do things without thinking. The mantra of vim and similar tools is to enable you to become one with the tool just like you become one with your bike, your tennis racket, your sword (!), whatever. Touch typing really helps here as well.
You can't understand that without investing enough time to that. (You don't have to. But you don't have to criticize it without really knowing what you are talking about either.)
I use Arch Linux. Keyboard accelaration is perfect.