Surely if you need to pack reformating, moving, copying and deleting code into as short a time as possible you're doing it wrong even more than if you had to insert a lot of text!
This leaves navigating as the main reason for vi's UI. And macros, apparently. If that's what you want, great, but it's not for me.
As others have said: You didn't learn touch-typing to churn out text as fast as possible. You learned it because it creates a more direct interface between brain and machine. It doesn't hinder your toughts, doesn't break the concentration.
It's the same with vim editing: The idea is not to be able to move code around as fast as possible but to do it without thinking. It's a step closer to the perfect brain-reading computer with which writing code is only a matter of imaging it.
For a new code base, you might be right. As code bases grow, so does cruft - and the older the code gets, the more it requires moving things around just so before you can add new items.
This leaves navigating as the main reason for vi's UI. And macros, apparently. If that's what you want, great, but it's not for me.