What's the most convenient way to edit multi-card vcard files (.vcf)?

Question

I have my contacts exported to a VCF file (a vCard) file. But they're partially messed up for reasons I won't go into. I'd like to edit them, making some changes to individual entries and some changes which are global (and would require, say, a substitution regexp application to each contact).

It seems I have three options:

• A dedicated vCard editor
• Conversion to a CSV, then using something like a spreadsheet or anything else which can handle tabular data, since many/most of these can take CSVs as input
• Editing the vCard file as a plain text file (e.g. vi and using regexps).
• Using an empty account in some mail/messages application and doing import, editing using its contacts UI, then export back out.

So, my questions are:

1. Is there some other alternative I'm missing?
2. I'm worried about format conversions and loading in/out of apps - it might change the format slightly; do you think this could be an issue (esp. w.r.t. using the contacts on multiple devices incl. Android-based smartphones)?
3. Which option would you recommend, or rather, what are non-obvious benefits/detriments of the different options?

Note: I don't want to make this a "app X is better than app Y" question, so if you're referring to specific utilities/applications just mention what's relevant to your suggestion without extolling it over other apps etc.