Calling evil mode heresy is the same as saying "I wish fewer people used Emacs." Why continue the holy war? You've won many vimmers over... why marginalize us?

I think the creators of evil mode are well aware that it is heresy. They even named it evil mode.

I think the whole holiness of Emacs and the evilness of vim is more tongue-in-cheek than anything.

Actually, Spacemacs layer configuration uses the use-package add-on ( https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package ) , which helps greatly simplifies and organizes large .emacs config files (and also greatly improves emacs' startup time). use-package was written by John Wiegley, created of the Ledger CLI accounting software, and current maintainer of Emacs. Emacs integration of packages with Melpa gets only a small part of the way towards where Wiegley goes with use-package. . . .

That's a pretty lightweight Emacs config. Mine is based on emacs-starter-kit (technomancy's creation) and is much larger - https://github.com/metaperl/emacs