You definitely had something misconfigured then...
Not saying that's your problem, emacs could do a lot more to be friendlier to newcomers. I'm just saying, don't be so quick to judge it until you've gotten with your local emacs nerd to see what's wrong with your setup.
init.el and .spacemacs: https://github.com/komali2/Configs/tree/master/emacs
Features like helm, ivy, projectile, etc cost. Linters and autocomplete can really make emacs jank. All this stuff is configured out the gate in these distributions.
I really like spacemacs (I'd love to get back to using vi keybindings in emacs), but man is it slow. Awfully cool, though.