I don't mean to be rude but to me this folder is just a collection of your configuration files. What I really want to know is what your configuration is, what changes have you made to make your environment usable and useful to you?
I've been using Vim for about 5 years now. I started because I needed an editor that supported syntax highlighting and auto-indent to work on the university servers over SSH.
It took (still takes) a lot of time to learn Vim. At first I used it as notepad with syntax-highlighting with auto-indent. That is, I immediately entered insert-mode and kept in there for as long as I could. But slowly I've started to learn myself how to truly use Vim. Nowadays I try and exit insert mode as quickly as possible (sometimes after typing just one or two letters).
Every once in a while I stop and reflect on things I do very often, look up ways to do them faster and then try and train those ways to be a habit. I learned most of these things from Bram Moolenaar's presentation "Seven habits of effective editing" (http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.pdf and http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078) most of this talk probably holds for emacs too.
Examples: when I need to rewrite a function arguments nowadays I just type "ci(" which does Change Inner parenthesis, it deletes all text between the enclosing parenthesis and puts me in insert mode to start typing. If I need to move more then 5 lines down I use incremental search instead of arrows/hjkl to move around. If I need to move to the end of a line I use $ (goto end of line) or A (append after end of line). If I need to go to the middle I'll use other shortcuts.
Vim has billions of ways to move around and select text for editing. Learning to use those relevant to your way of working is crucial if you want Vim effectively instead of annoying form of non-modal editor.
As for making Vim useful to you, I don't think anyone can tell you how to do this. You need to make it fit your style of working. Which means, trying, figuring out what bothers you and steal what works from others. Most of these example .vimrc's that people post do not include comments on what the options do, which makes this hard. I commented mine but it is rather sparse and I don't have a place to dump it at the moment to show you, unfortunately.
When I first started with vim, I immediately downloaded every possible plugin I ever thought I'd ever use, along with a bunch of complicated scripts that I added to my .vimrc, with hundreds of different options I copied from others' .vimrc files.
As I learned vim, I learned to appreciate its simplicity and now keep my config at the minimum possible deviation from default as I can tolerate. My .vimrc is fairly spartan (http://github.com/tomhsx/homedir/blob/master/.vimrc) and the only plugins I use are ctags, pyflakes, and shortcuts for F6/F7/F8 to debug/execute python scripts.
You can use repeat counts with the cursor movement commands. For example, 40h will move your cursor 40 characters to the right; or 5w will move it forward 5 words.
Alternatively you can use the search commands, '/' (forward search) or '?' (backwards search) with the text at the middle of the line as your search string.
You can use 40| to go to the 40th column of a line. I typically use e or b to jump by words to reach the middle of a line. You can also 5e to jump by 5 words for instance too.
I would be curious to know if there are other shortcuts for doing this too though.
I find myself using fX (find character X) often, where X is a character at the position I want to start editing.
When I'm editing string parameters of a function I'm calling, I use di' / di" a lot (moves to first ' / ", deletes inside content, and drops to insert mode).
I don't feel you were rude at all; you have only stated the truth as it is :-)
I posted that link as a suggestion to browse the relevant parts (.vim/ and vimrc) as they are the result of a Vim newbie quest through several content on the Internet describing how to get some of the most requested features from IDEs (for example, intelligent completion) working with Vim.
As you might see from my .vim/bundle, I use relatively few plugins; they are pretty standard things like a file browser (NERD Tree), except for the custom "plugin manager", Pathogen, that I found as a reliable alternative to Vimballs and the like.
I don't mean to be rude but to me this folder is just a collection of your configuration files. What I really want to know is what your configuration is, what changes have you made to make your environment usable and useful to you?