Well you're leaving the middle columns there, then on your first keystrokes it would be acutally {+down+left as Sublime does not put cursor back at beginning of line when going down. In all I used 26 keystrokes in Sublime, and 27 in Vim. Also, if you understand Vim's vocabulary, the "cognitive overhead" is, as you put it "far less" in Vim's favor. IMO.
21 presses (29 keys), compared to your 32. And all I had to think about was where the cursor was.
(Not to be pedantic, of course!)