Comment by rmunn

I think you're right and visual mode is underused. It gives you the best of both worlds: "cw" meaning "change word" for when it's obvious what you're going to be selecting, and "v3wwwc" for "change 5 words" when you discover (by experimentation) that the text you wanted to change actually counted as 5 words due to punctuation, not 3 as you had first thought.