This is why I picked Fedora GNOME and stopped worrying. It gives me the confidence that it won't break and that I can focus on other things instead of having to tweak the system or environment for me to work. I adapted to GNOME defaults (I don't even use dash-to-dock) and it feels great, it doesn't get in the way when doing stuff.
Distro hopping and trying a lot of (minimalistic) tools are fine to learn a thing or two, but at some point you'll have to do some work, and having your mind on "how to do this more efficiently" can be distracting.
> This is why I picked Fedora GNOME and stopped worrying. It gives me the confidence that it won't break and that I can focus on other things
Where do you get the confidence from? Because GNOME frequently broke workflows in the past. They removed status and desktop icons, the window titles in the overview vanished, Evince lost some feature with its latest redesign (which I can't remember right now what it was exactly), Nautilus lost its two pane mode, compact view and type-ahead search, which was replaced with a slower full-blown recursive search, ...
These kind of disturbances caused me to move to a much more personally tailored desktop and I can't remember it breaking once in like 5 years and certainly not to the extend the GNOME desktop breaks in almost every release.
in my vimrc so I can only press two keys to save the file. I think the colon character (:) adds a little overhead to such a common command because one has to press shift with the colon/semicolon key (depending on the keyboard layout), and then release them to continue pressing the remaining keys. And this is if you're already in normal mode; if you're in visual/insert mode you'd have to press Esc or Ctrl+[ first. Of course, these are small details that you don't normally think about, but it does feel a little cumbersome when coming from an editor where you can just press Ctrl+s or C-x C-s (in the case of Emacs) and continue working.
In the end, vim doesn't stop you from defining key bindings to improve your workflow.
Distro hopping and trying a lot of (minimalistic) tools are fine to learn a thing or two, but at some point you'll have to do some work, and having your mind on "how to do this more efficiently" can be distracting.