Hah, yeah. I used spacemacs for 2 years from summer 2018 until about two weeks ago. And you're right! It does incredible things for discoverability with the built in hydra integration.
I switched to Doom Emacs about two weeks ago because it's built to be more performant and the configuration is meant to be a thinner layer.
Even with spacemacs layers, one has to go hunting on the googles and spend a bunch of time tweaking things if the layer doesn't set things up perfectly out of the box. And it rarely does.
Overall, I think spacemacs and doom emacs are amazing. Huge steps up from the base install. I just think there is a long way to go still.
I switched to Doom Emacs about two weeks ago because it's built to be more performant and the configuration is meant to be a thinner layer.
Even with spacemacs layers, one has to go hunting on the googles and spend a bunch of time tweaking things if the layer doesn't set things up perfectly out of the box. And it rarely does.
Overall, I think spacemacs and doom emacs are amazing. Huge steps up from the base install. I just think there is a long way to go still.