re: The documentation, I found the standard Emacs docs good enough to learn high-level Emacs concepts and such, but whenever I went searching for the nuts and bolts of how to configure specific bits of functionality, the documentation I stumbled upon (it's rarely easy to discover) either a) assumed a high level of proficiency and understanding of Emacs internals, often accompanied by (or consisting entirely of) large snippets of Emacs LISP b) was written in a kind of reference style that failed to give much context or help the user along in any way, or c) would be contradicted or superseded by some other piece of documentation, usually because of subtle package incompatibilities (probably exacerbated by Spacemacs in my case).
The Emacs community does not seem to have converged on a particular documentation idiom so there is a wide range of documentation quality for various configuration use cases. Most of the time I ended up finding bits and pieces of answers on Stack Overflow or other message boards, and proceeding with a lot of trial and error. That is fun sometimes, but not all the time; it was a rare experience when the documentation really nailed it for me. There does not seem to be much thought to the user experience on the whole.
The Emacs community does not seem to have converged on a particular documentation idiom so there is a wide range of documentation quality for various configuration use cases. Most of the time I ended up finding bits and pieces of answers on Stack Overflow or other message boards, and proceeding with a lot of trial and error. That is fun sometimes, but not all the time; it was a rare experience when the documentation really nailed it for me. There does not seem to be much thought to the user experience on the whole.