Thank you the update, hope you're having/had a good trip. I have one thing I found a few days ago in vintage mode. If you press shift + V on a line to highlight it and then press up to highlight the lines above, the original line you had selected becomes unselected. If you do this in reverse it works just fine, i.e. selecting a line then hitting the down arrow.
Many thanks!
p.s. the true VIM nature is when you press ctrl + v it highlights that entire line, letting go of the keys that line is still highlighted then pressing up or down it will selected the entire line again in what ever direction you press until you stop hitting up or down.