Sure, if you put up with the pain of setting it all up, eventually, you have something that works and that only you can use.
I've tried a lot of editors over the years... Currently I'm using neovim. It's been pretty nice--after some major adjustments. I like altering my configs and changing what's not working for me. Would I use it exclusively? No, but it's a nice tool to have in my toolbox. And with some effort it also can look very pretty.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMVIJhC9Veg&embeds_euri=http...
With Spacemacs, the expected default is to use Vim-style editing, with the addition of the Space key (hence the name) to access all of Emacs functionality. It's quite user-friendly and very discoverable. And it's still Emacs, so it offers a lot of customization.
Doom Emacs is a more focused approach, it has a clean set of defaults, and the ability to load lots of optional features. One key difference with Spacemacs is the use of an extra CLI utility to manage things such as package installation and config upgrades. Doom also disables customize-mode, which leads to cleaner configs at the cost of some discoverability.
Personally, I've been using Spacemacs for years, the key shortcuts just make sense to me, and it includes everything I want. I also love the default theme, the documentation is helpful, and the main drawback, long startup times, is minimized because I never exit Emacs.
Also in my experience it is a lot faster.
You can end up with a similar feature set using any of the two, and yes, Doom Emacs will probably be a bit faster, but they are not entirely equal. The user experience is different, one easy example is that while using SPC as a leader key is a feature in both, the keymaps are quite different.
My recommendation would be to try them both: they are easy to install, and uninstallation is as simple as removing the Emacs config in your user directory.
> eventually, you have something that works and that only you can use
This criticism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You do a lot of keyboard sharing? Who else needs to use Your editor?
(Of course some implementations can be classified as just bad UX...)
There are some more-or-less objective criteria we can apply. From "how many actions it takes to achieve something" to accessibility.
This is not really objective because you also have to take into consideration how intuitive/simple the UX is. Given 100 related actions, clicking through a logically grouped nested menu or multiple pages to do something is going to require more steps but be something anyone can do. Memorizing and using keyboard shortcuts for all those actions will be more efficient, but isn't something someone could immediately do. There is of course an in-between where you can have menus to display available keyboard shortcuts, but some (most?) people will still prefer a GUI/mouse-based approach. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
"If emacs just use standard keys for open close save, cut copy paste undo, users will double in 1 year."[0]
[0]Emacs Modernization: http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_modernization.html
Can I customize the status bar to include my contextual information with a single line of code in VS Code? Perhaps not. So VS Code has bad UX for my needs. But many consider VS Code to have good UX.
A few years later, I'm still using my config and wouldn't go back. It's what allows me to make Emacs _mine_, after all. It requires a minimal amount of maintenance, mostly whenever I decide to upgrade the packages.