This mirrors my experience with emacs. I enjoyed tinkering with it but found I'd lose 30 minutes every time I thought "I bet I can make it do..."

Nowadays I'm using Code with the Vim plugin and I haven't tinkered with my config for quite some time.

Emacs is infinitely more powerful - but with Code I was able to set it up once and be done, and there's value in that too.

That (and the at the time, in my personal opinion, superior to anything else Office 2010 with the improved tabbed interface) was the reason I went back to Windows. Nowadays most of the time I don't even bother to change the color scheme an set a background image.

I just recently started to customise my Powershell profile. Let's see where this leads...

I think it depends on whether you can do stuff in the os even if it is not yet set up exactly perfectly. If so, then you can do stuff when you need to, and play with the os when you want to. But obviously some will be too distracted from doing anything such that that's still a bad idea.