Ah cool! I do multiline editing in sublime text. Mostly just lining up spacing and deleting all the + or - signs from a code diff. I haven't had a need to do more complex substitutions like you do. It sounds like you got a good system.
Discussion
I never used sublime .. but the thing with vim is it is basically a spreadsheet .. of character .. rows of characters and columns ( including white spaces ) .. so you can target pretty much every thing on canvas ... Imagination is the limit :-)