> My impression after reading a lot of blogs by Emacs users is that they spend more time thinking and writing about how to make Emacs do something, than the actual thing they are doing.

Indeed, that does seem to be the community of people who blog about emacs. It's a shame because it makes emacs look complicated to the beginner.

But like many users I have a short init file with very few customizations: In my case mainly removing all the chrome and other bells and whistles so emacs looks like it did back in the 1970s. And it works great!