I have been using vim for forever and I have dabbled in using emacs throughout the years. Emacs with the evil mode bindings is very comfortable, and I prefer org-mode over markdown (at least for the type of notes I do).
The main thing that stops me from using emacs though is how bloated it is. I don't want the games, web browser, email client, etc. Is there a way to remove those features from a standard install or from source?
Edit: I guess I'll stick with vim for now. It looks like Neovim might be more what I'm looking for instead of Emacs
I load most things I use in my init.el. I'm not worried about startup times because I rarely restart Emacs.