Yup. The moment you need editing capabilities more sophisticated than those three keys, though, I recommend switching to vi input mode (set -o vi) if you are familiar with vim keybindings. Although tapping Esc is not as quick as Ctrl (or, my chosen alternative, Ctrl-[), you have an entire library of editing commands already at your beck and call. I find that using 'f' or 'F' and '.' more quickly triangulates the problem area of the text in most cases.
Of course, if you are an emacs user, more power to you with the emacs bindings.
As a for-your-consideration, C-r leaves the cursor at the matched string when doing reverse search; so "echo helol world", enter, mutter "rats", C-r, o-l-sp, right (just to break the search), and voila you are now positioned on the offending substring
One could also use <c-p>,<c-a> and <c-f> to achieve the same result much quicker.