I’m a Vim turned Emacs + evil turned spacemacs user. And while I agree that spacemacs is nice and shiny and it’s nice to have community build config file but spacemacs certainly feels “heavy”.
My emacs.d was very fine tuned and it felt very zippy. Spacemacs has many amazing modes which I did not know existed but it turned my emacs a bit slow.
It’s like Ubuntu and Arch linux. It’s nice to have all the services which you might need pre-installed for you, but if you install only the things you need, you will enjoy the lightness and speed.