It's complicated, true. But it does a lot of work for you. I started to create my own setup from scratch with Evil etc. But recreating all that Spacemacs has

It's complicated, true. But it does a lot of work for you. I started to create my own setup from scratch with Evil etc. But recreating all that Spacemacs has, especially with customizing all the plugins for Vim keybindings, is countless hours of work. You can skip the layers and side-install custom plugins quite easily though.