> what kind of medication the OP stopped taking
The OP has a really "sane" take on things imho (yes, it's incredibly opinionated, but it's blog post featured on HN, not a SO question someone like you can close in minute :) - and I'm glad he bothered to write it, as I'd probably just send the link to it to any newbies asking me about "the magical vim" instead of bothering to tell them what I think) and he's right on one thing: vim will not increase the productivity of a new user. The actual productivity increase will only happen months later (basically too late to worth it), and it will not matter that much because 90% of the time spent coding is actually spent either:
(1) plainly writing code (no advanced editor functionality helps here, Notepad++ is basically good enough!),
(2) making simple edits to code (again, more editor functionality doesn't really help because 90% of the time spend editing code it actually spent thinking about what to edit, not actually pressing the keys)
(3) reading code,
(4) exploring codebases (the only thing helpful at this is a full featured IDE - it just takes too much work to turn vim in to something like this, and you'll just end up with something mostly matching Netbeans feature-wise, so you could just as well install Netbeans or something else better for your language/framework in 5min and spend 1h to really learn how to use it),
(5) debugging (again, the only thing that could, for some, including me, increase productivity, is a full-fledged graphical debugger).
...and if you need to improve that last 10%, then you are far from a beginner at anything, eg. you are not the person that vim tends to be recommended to nowadays.
And the OP also expressed why I like ST so much: "To code in Vim, you have to keep Vim in your head just as much as the code that you’re editing. You have to constantly think about what you’re doing." - at most (not all) things ST beautifully follows the "don't make me think" principle: eg. arbitrary multiple cursors (no other IDE or editor besides Notedpad++ has them yet, no matter how many users requested this for JetBrain IDEs for example), that just let you "edit without thinking", keeping the code in your working memory instead of the sequence of search and replace commands.
But all that said, I absolutely love vim's keybindings and modal editing concept, so I tend to enable vim keybindings or install a vim-emulator plugin on most IDEs and editors I end up using because it also spares you of having to commit the different shortcuts that every other IDE and editor uses to "muscle memory". I see vim like more like an uptional UI/X layer that should be addable to any decent editor or IDE to enable experts to improve their 10%. Fortunately Sublime text has such a "layer" so OP's post is kind of valid.