OK, I can potentially see where vi(m)'s rectangluar selection would be good for editing config files and such, but I'm pretty sure all modern editors have rectangular selection anyway (notepad is not a modern editor). My IDE has the ability to rename a variable and to comment/uncomment a selection which solves your last two problems.
I wasn't defending vim over your editor, just answering the question of when there are valid times to do 10 lines of block change. 2 more that came up for me yesterday:
We changed the data format being sent over JSON now I needed to:
1) make a bunch of int declarations into float declarations, fortunately those tend to bunch up.
2) Change a bunch of getInt calls to getFloat calls, but those are also bunched up together.
