But then I can add popular emacs packages and my custom functions and get WAY ahead.

I use a very basic emacs config. Emacs, org-roam, evil, evil-org, ivy, and which key. The most common way I do stuff is still M-x org-roam-find-node.

The only time investment was learning the readline keybinds and doing the emacs tutorial.

I do most of my coding in jetbrains with vim keys, and emacs is just a personal knowledge manager for me