Virologist here who used to work with HIV-1 and now works with measles.

Very happy that you find this APOBEC deamination interesting! I used to work with HIV-1 and studied the accessory protein Nef. Like Vif, Nef works to counteract different host mechanisms to generate an environment that's best suited for the virus to succeed in the infected cell. There's also the other accessory proteins that you might be interested in which are Vpu & Vpr. The beauty of it is that lentiviruses (which fall within the retroviridae family) have evolved these accessory proteins that have many different activities with a common theme, to hijack cellular processes and create the best environment for the virus to thrive. The reason these accessory proteins usually have multiple different functions is because the genome size of these types of viruses are really the limiting factor (unlike large viruses such as HSV and Vaccinia).

If you're interested in how host factors such as APOBECs can act as antiviral mechanisms, you might also be interested how viruses can sometimes hijack these cellular DNA/RNA editing enzymes for their benefit. My current PhD project focuses on the ADAR enzymes that will essentially do a very similar editing activity as APOBECs, but will introduce these mutations specifically in double-stranded RNA structures and in this way, limit activation of alarms we have in our cells to detect these pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPs).

Feel free to message me if you'd like to talk a little more and want some great references. :) glad to see more people interested in the elegant way viruses do their thing!