you might want to give spacemacs a go... it's quite good after you translate whatever vim config to emacs config. out of the box it's actually quite great and this is coming from a hardcore vim user that can't stand using a text editor without vi bindings and proper macro support etc. Everything is done pretty well and there isn't anything that I have found dealbreakingly lacking so far.
I know about spacemacs, and don't like the idea of core editor. Tried it and ended up using not emacs, not vim, but mix of both, and commands from both. And I do not like that.
I had the same experience. I love the idea of the space leader and the mnemonic keymappings, but too much of Emacs leaked through.
I've taken the lessons learned from Spacemacs and applied them to vim, remapping the leader to space and using mnemonics for remapping of some commands — all the markdown based commands are under space m, for example.
I had my leader set to spacebar in vim and used mneumonics for the bindings already, but the main thing other than the discovery of forggoten leader keybindings(how many can you really remember even with mneumonics?) that I dislike about vim is how almost every extension just feels broken and hacked together. there are some that work well but a lot of them are just crap and I attribute that directly to extension authors wanting to use viml as much as possible to keep maximum compatibility and reduce external dependencies. Lisp is a good language that is self documenting as well as being usable. viml is a terribly hacky language that is awkward at best and counterproductive at worst. I still love vim but vim needs a better language around it. perhaps when neovim picks up steam the lua backend will lure people to write good plugins in it.(lua is a pretty good language overall). just depends on who wins the war now between vim and neovim now that vim has better async support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKF41ivkBb0
it's also under active development so if that's your thing check it out.
https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/