Just wanted to reiterate this. When I started with Spacemacs I had a few years of using and customizing Vim under my belt, yet I still found it very daunting at the beginning.
The main problem is customization. Even though Emacs Lisp and the Emacs ecosystem allows for a more organized and advanced setup, there are so many options to do any single thing.
Add to that the newbie-unfriendly documentation, you end up spending way too much time trying to understand how to customize things properly, or at all.
Whereas with Vim, if I had a simple customization idea, I would just google it, find a solution in 2 minutes and slap a few more lines in my 1k LoC .vimrc.
The main problem is customization. Even though Emacs Lisp and the Emacs ecosystem allows for a more organized and advanced setup, there are so many options to do any single thing.
Add to that the newbie-unfriendly documentation, you end up spending way too much time trying to understand how to customize things properly, or at all. Whereas with Vim, if I had a simple customization idea, I would just google it, find a solution in 2 minutes and slap a few more lines in my 1k LoC .vimrc.