if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks
Is Spacemacs really that broken? I use the same GNU Emacs configuration across Windows, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, and macOS, along with packages like tramp, magit, slime, and python-mode, and the worst thing that's happened in recent memory is that either jinja2-mode or salt-mode (I forget which) doesn't indent things the way I like.
Spacemacs is that broken. The problem is that Spacemacs tries to impose its own shortcuts onto other emacs packages that may or may not know about spacemacs. For modes that perform extensive customization of their own, spacemacs alterations to emacs can result in some very weird behavior. For example, markdown-mode's highlighting, will, for mysterious reasons break when used with spacemacs [1].
The other problem with spacemacs is that if you're trying to use another emacs package, now you have to look up two sets of documentation. You have to look up the package's documentation to find the command that you want to execute, and then you have to look up the documentation for the relevant spacemacs layer to figure out what spacemacs has remapped the command to.
I tried to use spacemacs as a transition path from vim to emacs, but I found that I had much more success by just "ripping off the bandaid", remapping caps-lock to ctrl and spending a weekend forcing myself to relearn how to perform my most commonly used vim commands in emacs.
Is Spacemacs really that broken? I use the same GNU Emacs configuration across Windows, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, and macOS, along with packages like tramp, magit, slime, and python-mode, and the worst thing that's happened in recent memory is that either jinja2-mode or salt-mode (I forget which) doesn't indent things the way I like.