Comment by justinhj

Both Emacs and Neovim reward rtfm and working up from a vanilla configuration to your own custom one.

The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality.

I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more.

In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.