There's plenty of middle ground to stand on. By choosing vim alone, you already deviated from Unix purism (rabid Unix purists aren't that happy with bog-standard vi, either).

Saving round-trips to she shell ain't necessarily evil. Separate unix tools are great, but e.g. presenting info in the editor is quite helpful. Ctags does your parsing, but you can display it with tagbar. Language-specific tools do linting, but you can display it in the editor with syntastic…