Yeah there's this dilemma. Emcas, out of the box, seems stable enough (and performs well enough?). But for many of us, the features it offers ootb are nowhere near enough. So you start installing packages and it quickly turns into a clusterfuck and you have bizarre little bugs and interactions everywhere. And it still doesn't work exactly the way you want, even if the bugs were not present.. so you have to spend a huge amount of time trying to figure the clusterfuck out so that you can start working on it and make it right. And figure out why it got slow. Or sigh and give up.

It isn't helped by the fact that some devs insist on using bleeding edge melpa packages and their stable versions are broken. Other devs' bleeding edge versions are prone to break..

Emacs, with its packages, is one of the most chaotic things I've seen. I don't know if there's any hope for me to tame it in a reasonable timeframe.