I had a pretty full featured vim setup (creaking under the weight of all those plugins) and then switched to spacemacs. You're exactly right that debugging was a pain sometimes, but once I started to figure out what everything was, I wanted to replicate everything I had in vim.
I realised that if I'd started minimal I would have reinvented so many of the spacemacs wheels, but done it worse.
Spacemacs could do with being slightly more user friendly. It gives you a lot of friendliness already, but to prevent people from being frightened off by emacs' formidable reputation it really needs to "work" out of the box. For me that would be one click install and a reasonable suite of IDE-like features for working with a given language pre-configured. That would include scripting to install the command line tools that they shell out to, e.g. ag or rg.
I realised that if I'd started minimal I would have reinvented so many of the spacemacs wheels, but done it worse.
Spacemacs could do with being slightly more user friendly. It gives you a lot of friendliness already, but to prevent people from being frightened off by emacs' formidable reputation it really needs to "work" out of the box. For me that would be one click install and a reasonable suite of IDE-like features for working with a given language pre-configured. That would include scripting to install the command line tools that they shell out to, e.g. ag or rg.