I think I avoid using the mouse with vim. It's not about the mouse per se, it's about having to frequently switch back and forth that becomes frustrating.
I think that you have not learned to move around efficiently in vim. I would never enter that curly-brace command. I think most of my moving is with w, which jumps one word at a time. I also use / to search and page up and down. It sounds like you may be using harder commands than I do.
Becoming efficient with vim takes a little effort and practice, and you seem to have not committed to one single editor. You can't expect to be very good at every editor at the same time.
I appreciate the lesson, but that wasn't a curly brace command. What I said was typing "3/{", which seems like it's what you're suggesting: "/" to search for the "{" brace, but prefixed with "3" to jump to the third brace, which matches my example. You could do that with "/{" and two "n" keystrokes, but hey, that's one more keystroke.
I suppose I'm not a Vim superstar, but I've been using it since before the 6.0 release, and still use it today. You're right that it's not the only editor that I use, but it turns out that even if you can't be very good at every editor, when you've been using computers for nearly four decades you can be reasonably good at two or three.
I think that you have not learned to move around efficiently in vim. I would never enter that curly-brace command. I think most of my moving is with w, which jumps one word at a time. I also use / to search and page up and down. It sounds like you may be using harder commands than I do.
Becoming efficient with vim takes a little effort and practice, and you seem to have not committed to one single editor. You can't expect to be very good at every editor at the same time.