(quotes paraphrased for brevity)

Vim will not make you more productive. At [gratuitous company plug!], the
dude with Sublime is the best touch-typist, and the guy with an IDE is
good at refactoring.

These are false comparisons, and have absolutely nothing to do with Vim.

Does your Sublime guy code fast because he's an amazing touch-typist, or because he has better command over Sublime's shortcuts and special features than your Vim guys do? If it's the former, then it's irrelevant. If it's the latter, then it clashes with the point you tried to make in the next paragraph.

Of course your IDE guy is better at refactoring code. (S)he's using an IDE. That's what they do, better than any text editor. Comparing editors to full-blown IDE's is fairly "meta" to the topic at hand. However, it should be noted that almost every major IDE has built-on or plugin support for popular editor keybindings. I use Vim keybindings with IntelliJ... and even with my fairly baseline Vim familiarity, I'm able work several times more fluidly than on vanilla IntelliJ.

It may be true Vim requires the fewest key strokes to edit text. In practice,
you'll lose more time finding those ideal keystrokes. It's wasted effort to
learn a text editor, because programmers are not constrained by typing speed.

This is just outright nonsense, and tells me that you personally have never learned to use any text editor well. Sure, I would agree that it's unproductive to scour StackOverflow for a magical one-step incantation for EVERY thing you ever do. However, that is not what being proficient with Vim (or any other text editor) means. It means you organically pick up on things over time, such that you aren't having to think about it when using them.

If you pick up Drew Neil's book "Practical Vim", it's structured around 121 "tips". Each one is short, clear, and something that you can pick up and internalize in an hour. After the first 24 or so, you will absolutely be more productive that you would be with "Windows Notepad" bindings in the same situation.

It's not about crazy incantations that refactor your entire codebase in one keypress. It's about simple little things, that add up:

* I want to add an extra parameter to this method I just wrote. So rather than taking my hand off the keyboard and clicking there with my mouse (or hitting the arrow keys over and over), I just press "f)" to jump to the closing parentheses and start adding text.

* I want to replace everything on the current line, starting from my cursor position somewhere in the middle of that line. Rather than moving my hand to the mouse and dragging a selection, or holding <Shift> while hitting the arrow keys over and over, I instead just press "c$" and start adding text.

Sure, commands can be a bit arcane, but I learned them organically over a period of time... and these are real-world things that I do many times almost every single day as a coder. I probably only use 10% of Vim's available functionality, and that's enough to make my coding a much more fluid experience than it was before. Until you've experienced it first-hand, it's hard to grasp just HOW DISRUPTIVE it is to your flow and thought process to move your hand from the keyboard to mouse and back!

I don't care which editor (or IDE keybindings) you use. Vim, Emacs, Sublime, whatever. But you will absolutely be a more productive programmer if you pick one and dig into it over time. You ARE limited by your typing flow, and just don't realize it. If anyone really believes that isn't the case, then why bother to learn touch-typing? Take your two index fingers and try coding with the "hunt-and-peck" method, and see how it doesn't limit your thought process.