Great writeup and thank you making it clear that you want people to understand what's happening. I love the clean style of your site.

Let me also recommend some of my favorites:

  set matchpairs+=<:>     " match < and > as well
  set ignorecase          " case-insensitive search
  set smartcase           " upper-case sensitive search

If you already use ctrlp, you might also cpsm [0], a better matcher for it and ctrlp-funky [1] which allows you to go to methods and other symbols in a ctrlp style.

  [0] https://github.com/nixprime/cpsm
  [1] https://github.com/tacahiroy/ctrlp-funky