Agreed. I was really surprised with how odd vim-latex felt.
In my experience, most of these language-specific vim plugins stay pretty light, enhancing built-in vim behavior to perform in the expected way given a particular language's peculiarities. Instead, it tries to build up this complex system of macros and shortcuts that added a really thick layer on top of actually writing LaTeX (a process that I actually quite enjoy). Maybe it's another one of those things that I have to see in use to appreciate, and I'm sure there's some really useful stuff in there, but it just didn't seem worth it.
Once upon a time I used some vim plugin--and that one sounds familiar--to allow me to compile from within vim and then jump to that paragraph in the dvi viewer. I think I could also click a paragraph in the dvi viewer and jump to that text in vim.
