I am about a month further along than you on this journey. I started with vanilla Emacs and went through the built-in tutorial for a few days, then at the behest of friends switched to Doom.

Using Doom was valuable for me to see what Emacs can be. It is astonishing how much of an upgraded experience it is. However I felt I couldn’t understand where Emacs ended and Doom began, and the number of moving parts was making it hard to find solutions to problems.

For example, Doom keybindings for standard functions differ from normal Emacs bindings, so you can’t just follow any Stack Overflow post—the bindings won’t work. The fact that I didn’t even know why this was the case was getting to me.

I switched back to vanilla Emacs and, armed with the knowledge of what is possible, have been building up my config for a few weeks. I am making a special effort to avoid Evil Mode for a bit so I can learn all the bindings and make the decision for myself whether I like them or not. God Mode helps here as a more idiomatic alternative.

If your learning style is focused on knowing your foundation before building atop it, I’d recommend a similar path. I also have got a lot of value from sifting through others’ configs to pick up gems here and there. With literate programming it’s very common to find fantastically documented configs online.