[dparen12]

I rolled my own emacs configuration for many years, but I've been extremely happy after switching to doom. It includes sane defaults and comes with some special tricks for making startup fast. If there's something that's not exactly what I want, I just figure out how to fix it in elisp and that's where my emacs learning comes in.

You really don't need to build up a config from scratch to get the full power of emacs. Using doom just gets you further along the curve to having the config that you want. You will definitely need to do some further tinkering with elisp to get doom configured "just so" or to implement functionality, and I find that's plenty enough for learning emacs.