[iLemming]

Spacemacs doesn't magically liberate you from having to learn Emacs - it simply makes certain things more obvious, but also it obscures some other things. Be patient with it and you'll be rewarded. Whenever something breaks on my config due to an upstream change (a package gets updated with a breaking change) it usually takes me less than 2 minutes to triage that and find a workaround. It doesn't happen very often and I update packages multiple times a week.

[asciimov]

> Spacemacs doesn't magically liberate you from having to learn Emacs

Understandable, and not an issue for me.

My first issue was that there is an error from the start in the main version. That bug was fixed, but syl20bnr refused to do a hotfix. To make matters worse the main download that a new user gets is 13 months old at this point.

So a new user can either install the hotfix themselves or move to the dev branch. A new user isn't informed that they should just be on the dev branch and that due amount of changes since the last main branch release that the new user is better off deleting everything and starting over straight from the dev branch.

[iLemming]

experienced users know: it's better to be in development branch than in master. Sadly that's is the current state of affairs with Spacemacs. Development branch ironically is more stable - yes, things break sometimes, but they also get fixed rather quickly. AFAIK maintainers currently working on the next stable release and trying to figure out better strategies to move forward.