[kstrauser]

Doom is really cool and I appreciate the devs’ hard work. It’s seriously impressive.

But. Doom is an uncanny valley for me. It looks like Emacs, but feels like something else entirely, something unlike I’ve ever used before. If you want to use all the things available inside Emacs without learning the “bare” version, right on. But if you actually want to learn Emacs, in my opinion, Doom isn’t it. It’s its own thing, and it’s a fine thing, but whatever it is, to me, it ain’t Emacs.

[iLemming]

Doom is in all respects Emacs. It's a relatively thin layer of abstractions on top of Emacs. I've lived through a fair share of emacs.d bankruptcies until finally settling down on using Doom, and I almost don't even use "the official" modules — I use the core of Doom with a set of my own modules. You can easily scroll through early-init.el to understand what Doom adds on top of vanilla Emacs; what's there really to even "learn about"?

I have thought about rebuilding my config from scratch once again, with all the knowledge I gained over the years, but every time I think about it, I conclude that I inevitably would end up replicating some nice macros that Doom has, which do considerably reduce otherwise unavoidable boilerplate I'd have to write.

Doom may have improved discoverability of Emacs — a major complaint of newbies known for decades — but it can't magically make Emacs "something else entirely". I don't even get what you're talking about, it's like finding any complex package written in Elisp and lament that it doesn't even feel like an Emacs thing.