Why skip spacemacs? I've been in this mentality since early 2010s and I've been maintaining my own N k line of elisp script for ~15 years. Last year I installed spacemacs and TBH although not everything is exactly how I want, it's refreshing not to maintain my own OS to be able to code. Spacemacs still makes some things harder but overall I prefer it to building everything yourself from ground. Anyway, just my opinion. You can always customize Spacemacs too, of course it's gonna be more complex than vanilla emacs.
Some of the first advice I was given when starting to learn emacs, was learn vanilla first then try doom or spacemacs.
Hearing the love so many have for spacemacs, I started there first instead.
Quite early on, I ran into problems. Every time I reached out on various forums I was told either: you're doing it wrong, that's a non-issue, RTFM (which isn't helpful when you don't know what you're looking for), or my favorite you have an XY problem (I didn't). So I'd go back to vim and put emacs on the back burner for a while longer, waiting for spacemacs to mature.
After the third attempt at spacemacs, I gave up and started looking for a good emacs tutorial.
Again I ran into some issues, but I found the regular emacs people very welcoming and helpful. Pretty soon I was able to diagnose my own issues, and figure out what settings I needed to change to meet my needs.
In the end, that early advice was true. You need to have some understanding for emacs to help diagnose spacemacs issues.
Will I give spacemacs another shot? Maybe one day, probably around the time the update their main release. It's been what, 2.5 years since they updated the main branch?
I'm of two minds about it. I get the value it provides to people new to Emacs. But once you reach the point in which you'll want to dig in and adapt Emacs to yourself, you'll be facing not just learning elisp and Emacs, but also the complex framework Spacemacs built on top of that.
I've been using Emacs since early 2010s as well, so I'm biased - I had my own convoluted elisp modules before Spacemacs came around :).
