Emacs Prelude [1] is an excellent starting point for creating your own emacs experience, without being too heavy-weight or opinionated (as in does not deviate too much from the emacs way of doing things).

If you are a fan of vim style modal editing, Spacemacs [2] and Doom [3] are two popular emacs "distributions".

[1] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

[2] https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

[3] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Look around at GitHub, for example.

There is, for example, mine:

https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Emacs