I'm pretty sure that vi hasn't been distributed for years. All the vi's in modern distros are just pointers to vim.

I've built a suite of useful shortcuts that only work with my vimrc, which isn't a problem since installing my config from my github repo is a 3 step process, but when I'm running in some "vim-mode" editor I find myself tripping up on not having these things that I've committed to muscle memory and it ends up killing my productivity. At least if I know the editor is always in insert mode I can adjust with the occasional :w here.