Been there, done that. I dont recall exactly what went wrong, its been too long. I think part of it may have also been not knowing what came from spacemacs and what came native to emacs adding to the learning curve.
Setting spacemacs aside, other problems have largely been emacs itself. Something about the versions or dependency libraries available on linux mint and arch being incompatible with desired plugins, or installed plugins not activating or working.
Like I said, I might give it another shot, though given how comfortable I am with other options, I can't honestly say that I know what I would get out of it. Org-mode is uninteresting as I have no need for it, most other editors that I use have reasonable parentheses manipulation (or the fee keystrokes that would be saved with a shortcut arent a big deal). Other schemes and lisps I've tried have also had reasonable REPL integration as well.
Who knows, maybe this time around I'll find something to keep my interest. Does emacs have anything like VSCode's ability to run remotely in a docker container? That is something that definitely would be handy for working with gerbil, since I'm currently doing my side projects in osx
Seriously please do try Spacemacs -- setup is basically just a git clone, then start emacs, then (if desired) toggle stuff on/off in the .spacemacs file
