Layers are not an abstraction, it's an organization-system for the configuration. Anyone who has more then a handful lines of configurations develops some syste

Layers are not an abstraction, it's an organization-system for the configuration. Anyone who has more then a handful lines of configurations develops some system to avoid the infamous .emacs bankruptcy. And Spacemacs comes with dozen packages pre-configured, while offering the option to allow the user to choose from hundred more package-configurations. Similar slow startup. Majority impact on spacemacs startup is the regular search for package updates. Without it the startup-time is relative tame, though there is of course some place for improvment if you aim for <1 sec-startups.