As a long time vi and vim user, I disagree. Learning the keys tends to happen in stages (with arrow keys being stage 1) and reliance on hjkl is not the final stage. When you truly master vi/vim you barely use hjkl at all. Instead, you use fFtT/?nN;, text objects, addresses, and marks. These tools allow you to move to places in text and make changes at a glance without dealing with all the characters or lines in between.