It is a long long time ago that someone taught me something really new about vim and used plugins that are not just fancy (looking at most status line plugins or nerdtree) but actually seem to improve productivity in a vim-ish sense. Kudos!
python-mode or jshint2.vim? I don't think that they are "just fancy. Bringing linting into the editing window is more helpful (to me personally at least) than having a separate process running with it.
(Note: I turn rope off in python-mode because it's horribly inefficient, and sometimes causes Vim to delay reacting to user input)
