I don't think you need a whole lot of elisp knowledge to get started. You'll probably pick up a fair bit from writing your own config file, which isn't too hard

I don't think you need a whole lot of elisp knowledge to get started. You'll probably pick up a fair bit from writing your own config file, which isn't too hard. Then you can learn as needed from there. I use emacs for org-mode and still barely know elisp although I'm an experienced lisp programmer.