[GuiA]

The answer is going to sound terribly boring, but as someone who frequently deals with very large files of structured text: sometimes you just want to look at your data and quickly jump around. I want direct manipulation, not a data querying/manipulation DSL (whether that's grep, sed, SQL, etc)

[SiVal]

I wholeheartedly agree that it doesn't sound like much, but sometimes all I'm doing is applying general, human intelligence to the very vague question of, Is there anything in here that I'm not aware of but should be? That's not an easy query to write in grep or SQL, but it's a common query that often turns out to be important, so I handle it the old-fashioned way: I look it over with human eyes and see what I find.

[Elrac]

Here's a "me too!"

I spend a lot of time less-ing around in log files, but then every once in a while I need or at least want the full power of an editor to act on those files. Be it converting one kind of line delimiter to another so I can visually understand the structure of strange messages, excerpting blocks of the log to files,... lots of things I can do easily in vim (and probably could do in ST if I had ST in my environment) and not nearly so convenient otherwise.