[microtonal]

A community configuration like Spacemacs will continually update to provide you with a configuration that is up to date and doesn't break.

As far as I understand, it currently does not do that, since elpa/melpa/... packages are updated out of sync with Spacemacs and the last Spacemacs release is over 2 months old. See:

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/2057#issuecomme...

But, there is hope, the release notes for 0.200 say:

For 0.201 we plan to introduce stable snapshots of elpa repositories, a new installation of Spacemacs will always install packages from this stable source.

[wtbob]

'Up to date' doesn't mean 'bleeding edge'; a two-month-old (or even year-old) distribution can be up-to-date.