I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands.
> to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.
Most of vim is written in C with some interfaces exposed for scripting. Emacs is mostly written in elisp with some C code where necessary. The latter lends itself better to 'hackability' imo
For my own machines, I build emacs and import my saved init.el
On other machines, there is usually a standard vi/vim install that I can use if I am ssh'd in somewhere where I don't have my personalized copy of emacs. If I remember, I'll try to put these five lines[1] in the .vimrc for some saner defaults