> To me the serious obstacle that vanilla emacs is not that powerful at all.
There is no such thing as "vanilla" Emacs. Treat the scripts installed out of the box as a suggestion only.
> Everyone ends up with rather huge init.el setups with increasingly bizarre and arcane settings.
That's called customization. Those little warts are small tweaks done over time to tailor the editor to your liking.
The other warts can be removed by using something such as spacemacs. You can install a whole lot of packages nicely configured by adding a single line.
I threw away double digit megabytes of scripts (because I was vendoring everything before ELPA) for Spacemacs and haven't looked back.
There is no such thing as "vanilla" Emacs. Treat the scripts installed out of the box as a suggestion only.
> Everyone ends up with rather huge init.el setups with increasingly bizarre and arcane settings.
That's called customization. Those little warts are small tweaks done over time to tailor the editor to your liking.
The other warts can be removed by using something such as spacemacs. You can install a whole lot of packages nicely configured by adding a single line.
I threw away double digit megabytes of scripts (because I was vendoring everything before ELPA) for Spacemacs and haven't looked back.