[kevinjcliao]

Have you really saved time, though? I know next to nothing about elisp, yet I can be perfectly productive with Spacemacs. Being able to edit my .spacemacs file and add a functional layer for an entirely new programming language with sane defaults seriously beats fighting configuration files to do the same thing anyways.

This sort of 'configure your own' extremist software purity movement is great for some people, but if you want a setup that meets your needs 95% of the time, and works well, Spacemacs is great. I'm sure learning to configure your own vimrc has been a rewarding experience, but I don't think you can really argue it's a time saving measure.

[jsmeaton]

When I forked my dotfiles project I took the time to learn what most of the changes, commands, and config did. I removed a lot that I didn't find relevant. But I don't think I'd have gotten near to the current state if I'd started from scratch.

I think there's value in learning what prepackaged configs provide and tailoring them. I don't necessarily agree that starting from scratch is optimum for most though.