Interactive external commands is also one reason that made me return back to regular #vim, in addition to working remotes out of the box and the fact that I use only a few plugins, which carry out somewhat trivial tasks where e.g. performance is not a factor.
Interactive external commands is a useful feature from time to time because it allows to leverage privileges for an external command.
For example, this will result an error in #neovim instead of a password prompt: :r !sudo ls
.
@jarkko
I'm skeptical that plugins will perform better in #Neovim compared to #Vim. For example, plugins like Fugitive written in legacy VIML will likely have similar speeds in both editors. Only plugins optimized for #Luajit can achieve faster speeds, but I've only come across a handful of those, which, by the way, won't be compatible with Vim.