I wound up doing the same thing (not with Janus, but with a massive forked .vimrc).
One day I was SSH'd into a remote server and vim'd a directory by accident and I discovered Netrw. It wasn't the same as NERDTree, but it was good enough for me to get rid of that plugin. Eventually I just learned to enjoy the defaults with minor tweaks. Today my vimrc[1] is < 200 lines, mostly comments and navigation shortcuts.
Nice, I have a bit more (eg Pyflakes highlighting, Pysmell completion) but I share the same trend: barebone vim (no gui, no mouse, no pathogen infection).
I was looking for the rightbelow this, found it in your vimrc. Found it weird you don't have wildmenu...
I used NERDTree for a long time until I saw a simple tutorial to netrw - now I love netrw and don't want to ever go back to NERDTree. It's simple and to the point and just works really well for me.
Hm.. maybe I need to take another look at netrw. Last time I played with it, the big thing that led me to prefer NERDTree was the difficulty in opening a file you navigated to in the pane to the right. It kept replacing the netrw pane.
One day I was SSH'd into a remote server and vim'd a directory by accident and I discovered Netrw. It wasn't the same as NERDTree, but it was good enough for me to get rid of that plugin. Eventually I just learned to enjoy the defaults with minor tweaks. Today my vimrc[1] is < 200 lines, mostly comments and navigation shortcuts.
[1]: https://github.com/mgirouard/Dots/blob/master/.vimrc