For spacemacs, I'd recommend you try it again in Holy mode with Ivy. Then slowly customize some of it to add some features and key bindings to your liking that make you more productive.

Emacs really clicks if you are someone whose going to learn your way around Emacs lisp and customize things to what works best for your style.

And make sure you use the develop branch.

Once you've groked that, you can slowly try to switch to Evil bindings, and explore if you enjoy modal editing or simply get some inspiration from the Vim editing commands and style.