The only way to win at dotfiles is not to play.

Fresh out of college all my peers were using fancy 3D mice with programmable buttons for mechanical modeling and one older engineer was just dragging his finger around on the laptop trackpad. It was painful to watch.

Over 15 years later I realize that old guy knew what he was doing. Learning to deal with the defaults lets you drop into any standard install and go, whether that's for 3D modeling or Linux software. Unless you just love constant fiddling with custom config then having it all rot away in the next upgrade or hardware change there are much more productive uses of time.