Have you tried remapping CapsLock to Escape so now you have a quick access to the most important key of your editor and can actually enjoy it ? Most vim users do it but they never talk about it and the beginners have no clue and suffer needlessly from this historical accident.

It is more like ... when I am writing I like to stay in insert mode as long as possible - and this is where I would put the 80% of the time in vim.

Once I put on my edit/refactor hat, that is where normal-mode shines :)

And of course, special shout out to visual-selection mode.