I actually used to hack on vanilla Emacs but then I switched to Doom Emacs. Why? Because, like many others, although I am interested in configuring my editor, I am also interested in getting on with my work. With Doom Emacs, if I want to install support for a certain language, I need only uncomment a line in one of the config files, run doom sync, and then support for that language is installed. But you're not really sacrificing any customisability so you still get all the advantages of working within Emacs.