I started this way and my next step was taking advantage of the current package manager. The fact you can inject new functionality so quickly made me really fall in love with emacs. Adding additional programming modes/file format modes without any headaches has been a boon to my usage of Emacs. I'm rarely tuning settings in elisp anymore and instead just adding a feature so the file has colourization and tab stops working properly. If I do actually want to customize something since customize-mode works well enough now I can usually find the modest setting I do want to change without much hassle.