So I just replaced a very complicated git repo with numerous submodules with a much simpler one.
This gift was granted to me by the creator of Vundle, which is a vim package manager that lets you specify desired vim packages in your .vimrc and then handles the download and installation of same, automatically.
Since I'm likely to copy my .vimrc around (another reason it was in a git repo was to keep it sync'd across multiple machines), I added an autoinstall block to the top, so that it will autoinstall vundle if it needs to. Yay for automation!