Not many plugins make it an unfamiliar editor. Actually, reconfigurations of core vim are more likely to cause that kind of frustration (e.g. if you change vim to use Ctrl-V for paste instead of blockwise visual mode). This is so easy to fix.

Getting your dotfiles in git once didn't seem necessary to me - and indeed you can get by just fine - but god it is nice not to have to redo any configs and have my setup always ratcheting forward because I don't keep losing things or not having them.