I feel the same way; Spacemacs is neat and all, but its core philosophy just rubs me the wrong way. I want my installation of Emacs to have the packages needed

I feel the same way; Spacemacs is neat and all, but its core philosophy just rubs me the wrong way. I want my installation of Emacs to have the packages needed to fulfil my own personal needs, no more. I also want to know that if I do nothing to my Emacs configuration, in 10 years my experience will be exactly as it is today. Spacemacs takes the opposite approach and supplies you with more gadgets than you need and the "crowd-configured" aspect of the project means that what you have today and what you have six months from now could be very different. It might be a product of my age (I'm not that old, 32), but I've noticed that I've become more reticent to change in the past few years, especially when it's change that modifies daily habits of mine. With that said, I think that Spacemacs does have good things going for it that I'd like to see trinkle into Emacs eventually. For example, the idea of having keybindings "namespaced" (e.g. 'f' for file manipulations, 'p' for project, etc.) is a great approach to make sense of the dizzying number of commands available in Emacs, and it'd certainly be cool if something like that was introduced into Emacs (in addition to the existing bindings).