As you say, updates are a bit rough. I've given up on updating,and periodically I just reinstall it from scratch (a fairly painless process, they did amazing at making it easy to install). I figure this is comes with the territory of a rapidly evolving package.
The Treesitter and LSP features give me real-time code intelligence that I had been missing, and has made porting python2->python3, especially with type annotations, so much easier!
I’ll give SpaceVim a shot. LunarVim is great, but it’s good to see what else is out there. I love vim in general, but I’ve found myself killing too much time fine-tuning/breaking my config. LunarVim more or less works out of the box and gives me what I want. I’m curious to see what SpaceVim has to offer.
I think these packages need to ship with homebrew or atleast some sort of an installer. Building them seems to be very hard for people who just want to use it, and not go down hacking rabit hole.