Depending on how you define "sane" it can be months. Vim is said to be a programming language for text editing - I wouldn't expect anything less of a complexity from a thing like this. I recently learned Emacs and it took me two months - that short because I already went through the process with vim some years ago - to learn it and configure it to my liking. My Emacs config counts 983 lines with comments and whitespaces removed[1]. My .vimrc was shorter, but mainly because I dislike vimscript and like Lisps.
That's only the first time. It's a completely different paradigm and you have to learn it. Once you've learnt it this entire list is a non-issue. Not only that - configure it as you want, then take that config with you to every other machine that you ever use - surely that's worth the effort.
It starts with a sane configuration, the problem is when you want to add loads of features you have to spend a small amount of time adding them. The alternative is to have a fucking insane amount of functionality present to begin with because everyone wants something slightly different.
