[bananamerica]

Doom Emacs is excellent. I believe you were negatively impressed by the default install, but you can install it without any packages you don't wan't, or any package at all. You can even remove Evil altogether.

You can also easily remove anything afterwards.

Doom is essential for my sanity, and extremely flexible. I can do everything I want, just like on a barebones install. But I do it in a way that is way simpler, more practical, and performant. I'd use Doom even without any of its modules, just for the macros, the speed, and the sane configuration layout.

I tried the build your own route for 2 years, ended up with a huge messy init impossible to maintain. Doom removes a lot of complexity and provides extremely useful macros. The guy really knows what he's doing, and the optimizations that he uses are impressive.