After years of a love/hate relationship with Vim (I love what it does, but have configuring it), I had an epiphany: by sticking with the defaults, whether they are my preferred choices or not, I can instantly understand how to use Vim in any environment. Once you get used to biting the bullet and hitting escape instead of jj, or ctrl+c, it just works, everywhere.
If you abandon the urge to pimp out your Vim with a billion plugins, and just use it raw, it's a kind of editor Nirvana. Let go of your desires and live without want :)
Of course, that's just me. I understand why someone would want to turn Vim into their personalized powerhouse editor with IDE powers, with their .vimrc a 'git pull' away.
But I've learned to live with the humble defaults, and it's made life easy.
Some defaults aren't very usable, although "Debian defaults" are very close. I had the same approach, but lately I've decided to add plugins or configuration to "enhance" and never "replace", and I have never been happier as I'm now with vim.
I also decided to invest some time to move to vim + tmux instead of using gvim and now that I'm used to the extras I get with tmux (yep, terminal support in vim 8 is nice but not as flexible), I think I can't go back!