For me vim is one of those things that just works. It's ever present, reliable, and dependable. The simplicity of it mirrors the unix way and my usage of it is so closely wrapped in screen, /tmux, bash, gnu-coreutils, and a few terminals over the years that any change is going to have me asking 'why?' essentially. So a command line flag allows familiarity of existing tooling to really sing, and I suspect offers far more compatibility than the suggested fix too given the length of the windows addendum to the guide

And totally agreed about out in, I use Arch btw. And I'm not in a hurry to switch to nvim either, I tried and switched back pretty quickly. Pathogen is still an amazing plugin system, leveraging my git and bash knowledge to boot