Another way to look at it is saving time and effort to do it right at the start. Learning how to use emacs without paredit and then learning again with paredit

Another way to look at it is saving time and effort to do it right at the start. Learning how to use emacs without paredit and then learning again with paredit is twice the work of just learning once with paredit. That's an exaggeration, it's definitely a lot less than twice the work. I'd say 1.2 times at most.