I also often find myself going through all the steps in one of these articles then when I'm all ready to reap the results of success I move on to something else.
Which seems to happen quite often when people customize their software, especially up-front, instead of over time. I suppose you could describe it as waterfall-style customization
Once you've learned a bit more, it becomes second nature to a) make the tweaks you need and b) filter out those you don't.
I, for one, enjoy the ability to adapt my editing/workflow as my needs evolve.
LOL. As a dyed-in-the-wool Emacs user for 20 years, I have to admit that this is true. On the other hand, it makes me happy that the flagship software project of Free software is still alive and kicking. Moreover, people have been making these comments about Emacs ever since the early 1980's.
These days, my .emacs is very minimal and on any new machine my standard setup can be manually recreated in five minutes, mostly using Customize.
There is no need for any complicated thing that has to be automatically downloaded and updated in-place from a source control management repository. This is especially important when, for example, you are working in a heavily fortified corporate network, where access to the outside Internet needs to go through strange proxies if it is allowed at all. And in these cases it's usually a stressful environment to begin with, so when your boss -- who doesn't know anything about programming and just wants to see results quickly, dammit -- asks you what you've been doing all day, you don't want to have to explain that you spent all your time figuring out how to get Emacs to work over the corporate proxy.
