While I agree that vintage lacks some refinement, the source for the plugin is sitting in your sublime directory and is fairly easy to hack on. Things like the one-off cursors are fairly easy to fix. I'm not sure what you mean about switching files; I don't notice that particular problem. Do you have '"vintage_start_in_command_mode": true' set in your config?
As far as a vim-style editing plugin goes, vintage has by far been the best I've encountered. It's one of the few where it's fairly straightforward to add in the hacky things I've done to vim and still get a similar experience.
The code is quite nice indeed, and oh so small for a vim emulator - I've contributed a significant chunk to XVim which is positively massive in comparison, so I have some frame of reference.
The problem is that if you want all the fixes you pretty much have to compile a version with all the pull requests yourself as they don't get merged into mainline in a timely fashion. I would personally be much more keen to fix these things if I knew that my efforts along with everyone else's were expediently dealt with.
I do have vintage_start_in_command_mode set, but that apparently only works on startup (I read somewhere on the forums that it's a per-file setting, whatever that means).
Vintage is pretty good, but I don't agree that it is top shelf - ViEmu and jVi are both better Vim emulators IMO, and Vrapper and XVim are better in at least some regards.
As far as a vim-style editing plugin goes, vintage has by far been the best I've encountered. It's one of the few where it's fairly straightforward to add in the hacky things I've done to vim and still get a similar experience.