I have to agree that Spacemacs is seriously complex. I first cam to it because I wanted to try Emacs coming from Vim/nvim but it suffered from prettt bad load times, a bad C/C++ story and a leaky abstraction over packages. I'm the end I configured Emacs from vanilla (with Evil mode!) and I've had a much better time. I've also picked up quite a bit of elisp, which is much much much better than VimL.