I had similar feelings, but I've actually been using (an admittedly, somwhat tweaked version of) Batsov's Prelude for a couple of years now. It pulls in a lot

I had similar feelings, but I've actually been using (an admittedly, somwhat tweaked version of) Batsov's Prelude for a couple of years now. It pulls in a lot of exceptional packages with sensible defaults (without trying to make it stop being Emacs, a common fault of such kits) and has very good facilities for customization and managing things like package loading order.