Vim mastery is not just regex. Regex is basically the same as using sed or grep in Vim.
The key to Vim mastery is realizing that every key you press is a command in the language of Vim. Once you realize this, you can construct complicated sequences of commands that do exactly what you want without having to do it yourself manually. This is why I say that it is difficult to see how much more efficiency you can get without witnessing it yourself. It is a fundamentally different way of doing text editing.
Let's just focus on navigation for a second. Yes, you can type things like "10j" to go down 10 lines. Yes, you can type "10}" to go down 10 "paragraphs" (could be functions, etc.). Or you can type "/text" to find the next instance of "text", and then type "10n" to go to the 10th instance. Once you realize all of these things, you start to think about navigating the code a lot differently, since you realize that you can make your code very structured and make it incredibly easy to navigate with just the keyboard.
Let's now focus on something that would be really tedious to type but would happen instantly in Vim. Let's you you want to make an array of 100 elements for some reason. If you had to type that manually, you could have an off-by-one error or something. It's really tedious and not something you want to do yourself.
Instead, you can type this in Vim:
i
array = [
Esc
99A
0,
Esc
A
0]
Esc
and you have an array with exactly 100 zeros. This is a simple example. You can continue this to much more complicated structures. That is the power of Vim.
(Yes, if this is Python you can do the same thing with "array = [0] * 100". My point is to illustrate Vim's command language and how it changes how you approach text editing.)
The key to Vim mastery is realizing that every key you press is a command in the language of Vim. Once you realize this, you can construct complicated sequences of commands that do exactly what you want without having to do it yourself manually. This is why I say that it is difficult to see how much more efficiency you can get without witnessing it yourself. It is a fundamentally different way of doing text editing.
Let's just focus on navigation for a second. Yes, you can type things like "10j" to go down 10 lines. Yes, you can type "10}" to go down 10 "paragraphs" (could be functions, etc.). Or you can type "/text" to find the next instance of "text", and then type "10n" to go to the 10th instance. Once you realize all of these things, you start to think about navigating the code a lot differently, since you realize that you can make your code very structured and make it incredibly easy to navigate with just the keyboard.
Let's now focus on something that would be really tedious to type but would happen instantly in Vim. Let's you you want to make an array of 100 elements for some reason. If you had to type that manually, you could have an off-by-one error or something. It's really tedious and not something you want to do yourself.
Instead, you can type this in Vim:
i
array = [
Esc
99A
0,
Esc
A
0]
Esc
and you have an array with exactly 100 zeros. This is a simple example. You can continue this to much more complicated structures. That is the power of Vim.
(Yes, if this is Python you can do the same thing with "array = [0] * 100". My point is to illustrate Vim's command language and how it changes how you approach text editing.)