I had a very similar experience and at the end of the day I switched back to vi(m) (and specialized IDEs) mostly because I didn't have the time to constantly ev

I had a very similar experience and at the end of the day I switched back to vi(m) (and specialized IDEs) mostly because I didn't have the time to constantly evolve my emacs environment to solve the tasks at hand efficiently. I can see the appeal of emacs though if you really have the time and energy to deep dive and make it your own environment. To this day, I still swap ctrl/capslock - that is so useful that it should just be a standard.