I’ve noticed a pattern running through a few recent episodes of Vimcasts: I’ll demonstrate one way of doing something, and remark that to revert the change requires two or more undos. Then I’ll demonstrate another way of doing the same thing, perhaps using functionality from a plugin, and this time I can revert the change with a single undo. That seems to me to be a good criteria for deciding which method is better: it’s the one that can be reverted with the fewest number of undos.