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You miss a major benefit: the ecosystems of these editors evolve very quickly. Packages are updated and broken regularly, adding new features and interoporability that you may not be able to learn about yourself.

A community configuration like Spacemacs will continually update to provide you with a configuration that is up to date and doesn't break.

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A community configuration like Spacemacs will continually update to provide you with a configuration that is up to date and doesn't break.

As far as I understand, it currently does not do that, since elpa/melpa/... packages are updated out of sync with Spacemacs and the last Spacemacs release is over 2 months old. See:

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/2057#issuecomme...

But, there is hope, the release notes for 0.200 say:

For 0.201 we plan to introduce stable snapshots of elpa repositories, a new installation of Spacemacs will always install packages from this stable source.

'Up to date' doesn't mean 'bleeding edge'; a two-month-old (or even year-old) distribution can be up-to-date.

This is a tradeoff not everyone can afford to make. A clean Spacemacs installation right now brings in a broken org-mode that cannot do exports. Spacemacs needs version pinning and stable package channels.

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