Let's go for another long comment.

1. I've seen that "…". I think it's an horrible UI as it is always at different horizontal positions forcing me to move my eyes a lot more than necessary. That symbol is also almost completely devoid of information: the number of folded lines and a sample are often useful and I can't get that with "…". Except if I take my mouse and hover on that "…" to preview my 50 or 100 folded lines cramped in a huge ass popin. Contrast that with a regular fold in Vim: http://i.imgur.com/WXg1p.png

* it is easy to find
* it is easy to parse
* it shows the number of hidden lines
* it takes only one line
* its purpose is obvious

2. Vim as signs for errors and fold indicators, there are plugins that show marks, too. A "fold" sign in the gutter is mainly useful if it's hard to notice the fold in the editor space. Because it's hard to spot "…" folds you scan the gutter to locate folds. Because it's hard to miss a fold in vim, such an indicator is not needed. But Vim's foldcolumn not only shows the location of a fold: it provides an additional information that no right pointing triangle or boxed plus sign can show: the depth of the fold. Anyway, if you only care about seeing folds in the gutter, well… that's covered too by the simple fact that the whole line is highligted.

3. I also work on small projects (under 50/60 files without assets) and everything in CtrlP is instantaneous. We obviously have very different æsthetic preferences: I find everything in ST2 absolutely hideous. The font size tricks in ctrl+p you describe are both very arbitrary, simplistic and distracting. Vim's CtrlP shows the paths of the matched files, highlights the matched characters and systematically puts the default match at the bottom. There's nothing hard about it: simple, clear, fast… and, again, it has lots more features than its ST2 "counterpart". Not to forget Vim's native wildmenu which also shows the path and highlights your choice in a very readable manner.

I don't agree with your last paragraph as well.

I really really really don't care if or why people don't like Vim. I chose it over dozens of editors/IDE because it worked for me: not because it was fashionable, not because I mistook it for something else. I have no stake in this, I don't root for Vim, I don't want more users, I don't want less users, I just don't care if it's easier, harder or whatever. I'm perfectly fine with Vim in its current state and I'm persuaded it doesn't need any of those pseudo-refinements. Vim is the work of love of a bunch of talented programmers with an unbelievable ecosystem. It's free in every meaning of the world, it's old and a lot more powerful than any other editor, with the possible exception of Emacs. Its core developpers and, I believe, many users certainly prefer Vim as it is and don't care at all about making it easier for new users. More attention, more users… all of that is necessary for Panic, MacRabbit, Macromates or SublimeHQ because that's the only way they can survive. They desperately need differentiating "features" to attract new users or justify license upgrades and make more money: skeuomorphic UI, rounded rectangles, gradients, transitions, integration with this or that trendy language or framework and so on. None of that matters to Vim and its developers and lots of its users.

ST2's author is probably happier each time a Vim user switches to ST2 but Bram Moolenaar most certainly doesn't give a flying fuck. That's very important and that has to be considered when talking about cosmetic "enhancements" or "fixes" to Vim.