I agree with you, and my Vim setup is loaded with plugins.
The power of Vim is, first and foremost, Vim. A good set of plugins is simply for augmenting Vim and/or tailoring it to your desired workflow.
The plugins I use could be broken up into groups. The first group are the ones that add truly valuable core functionality to Vim. This is the smallest group of plugins by far. I consider the "fuzzy finder" plugins to be in this group (Command-T is the one I use). These plugins add meaningful, widely-applicable functionality to the editor.
Then, there are the ones that are convenience plugins. An example is ack-vim. It lets me run ack from within Vim, and provides the ability to jump directly to files in the result list. I am, of course, perfectly capable of running ack in my terminal. But this makes using ack slightly more convenient.
Next are purely aesthetic ones, like colorschemes. Not important, but pleasant.
Finally, there are the updated language configurations - the things that provide language-specific syntax highlighting, indention, and so on. Vim already comes bundled with these. Adding them as plugins simply allows you to pull the very latest versions of them. Nice to keep these up-to-date, but unless your Vim build is old, you'll already have pretty recent versions of these.
I would miss these plugins if I could never use them again, but when I use a different editor, I rarely find myself missing plugins, but I find myself missing core Vim very badly.
The power of Vim is, first and foremost, Vim. A good set of plugins is simply for augmenting Vim and/or tailoring it to your desired workflow.
The plugins I use could be broken up into groups. The first group are the ones that add truly valuable core functionality to Vim. This is the smallest group of plugins by far. I consider the "fuzzy finder" plugins to be in this group (Command-T is the one I use). These plugins add meaningful, widely-applicable functionality to the editor.
Then, there are the ones that are convenience plugins. An example is ack-vim. It lets me run ack from within Vim, and provides the ability to jump directly to files in the result list. I am, of course, perfectly capable of running ack in my terminal. But this makes using ack slightly more convenient.
Next are purely aesthetic ones, like colorschemes. Not important, but pleasant.
Finally, there are the updated language configurations - the things that provide language-specific syntax highlighting, indention, and so on. Vim already comes bundled with these. Adding them as plugins simply allows you to pull the very latest versions of them. Nice to keep these up-to-date, but unless your Vim build is old, you'll already have pretty recent versions of these.
I would miss these plugins if I could never use them again, but when I use a different editor, I rarely find myself missing plugins, but I find myself missing core Vim very badly.