[cryptarch]

You're touching on some of the same painpoints I encountered, though I don't know what Jedi is.

My impression is, we might both benefit from starting from a bare-bones Emacs setup and expanding that by hand.

I guess vanilla Emacs would be the most bare-bones experience, or at least the most bare-bones experience you can find help for on Google (which kinda hurts me to say, but DDG has worthless search results and only sticks in my browsers because of the !bang functionality).