I guess I never understood the custom emacs distributions for long time users. If you had a system that worked... lugging it around isn't hard. It is usually a few hundred lines of elisp plus packages, which you can freeze and zip up and they are probably going to work on an emacs release 5 or 6 years in the future.

I don't worry about it cause I just backup my .emacs.d and restore it anywhere I plan on editing very long. My whole .emacs.d with tons of modes and add ons is 73MB.

There /is/ something to be said with not making a mess of your initialization file and customizations. It is also very possible to keep glomming addons in and eventually get to a difficult place where various elements of extensions/modes/packages are fighting and that can be frustrating and I can see why many turn to well tuned emacs distributions.