The fact that I cannot use `space` as a direction/movement key in spacemacs is a non-starter for me. I'd have more luck just learning Emacs's keybindings at that point.
it honestly felt really backwards to use spacemacs after ~10y of vim usage. i would prefer to learn plain emacs + evil mode instead.
I have now started back with emacs + evil and a minimal setup. I find it gives me the best of all worlds.
everyone talks about spacemacs=vim. this is nice, but what turned me off of spacemacs was the layers config abstractions. It breaks the normal configuration of emacs. Just install evil mode and a few contrib packages.. that's spacemacs lite.
(One of the big lures of spacemacs and/or evil-mode for me is that I've always been envious of Emacs Lisp. I see things like GNUS and org-mode and SLIME... then I see Vimscript, and I hang my head in shame.)