IMHO, one of the real benefits of vi is the elegant way it delegates many tasks to external programs rather than having everything built into one huge executable (or, what amounts to the same thing, tacked on as a "plugin" or "extension".) This "one tool for each task" approach is the Unix way of doing things, and using traditional vi is a good way to develop your Unix chops.
(When it comes to vim, I'm more than a little ambivalent. While it still supports the traditional model, vimmers seem to relying more and more on builtins and extensions. This is what vi looks like as it evolves into emacs, and I'm not sure I like it.)
In the same vein, other real benefits of vi is that it uses Unix-standard regular expressions for search and replace operations, and has a commandset that it roughly similar to sed's. Again, getting familiar with these things is part of developing your Unix chops.
And if you don't care about developing those chops, why use a BSD in the first place? You might just as well be using Windows, one of its Linux clones, or OS X.