> There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either.

> It's roughly equivalent to trying to discover all of our scientific knowledge yourself from scratch vs taking "for granted" the knowledge discovered by your forebears.

The author do have another config with all the bells and whistles. But Emacs does come with a lot of packages and tweaking them isn't that much work compared to building a full suite like Helm, especially with the awesome documentation system. Getting a v0.x of anything can be a matter of minutes. And then you wake up one day and you've built a whole OS for your workflows.