prelude VS evil-guide

I used to have my own (rather extensive) config, and switched to prelude a bit more than a year ago. I think the whole key to prelude is that it promotes useful packages, with an eye on beginners. I did change a whole bunch of things, but there's less I need to get rid of in prelude (like disabling guru-mode, what you mention) than I'd have to add to vanilla Emacs, so I stuck with it. I can recommend investing some time and giving it a chance - I think most people won't be entirely happy if they don't do that.

My additions/removals are just a few lines now and I find the whole setup a lot more maintainable than rolling my own: https://github.com/fhd/prelude/tree/personal/personal

But yeah, all I can say is that it works for me (with a little investment), YMMV.

2. the leader key https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide#leader-key

these are random search results that may or may not be authoritative, but they should be a good start.

Doom uses Evil-mode for vim emulation. https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide is a good guide for translating between vim concepts and Emacs.

I'm not aware of a guide specifically for non-vim users, but pretty much any vim guide will be helpful - it's just best to avoid parts on vimscript, as evil isn't configured using that. Even though it introduces itself as a guide for Vim users, I still think https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide is worth a read. As for packages which complement evil, most are named with evil as a prefix, so you can browse melpa with that in mind. One exception that comes to mind is lispyville, which provides an evil approach for editing s-expressions. evil-cleverparens is also worth a look. Feel free to ask any questions on the evil issues page too!

Evil is a complex machinery build by vim nostalgic refugees, so familiarity with Vim's modal editing model is still recommended. I like this, even if it's not a tutorial: https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide

I'd recommend reading noctuid's evil guide, particularly the link to the spacemacs keymap guide and the mention of the commentary on evil-core.el

It’s probably worth understanding what evil is doing so you can make your own key bindings for packages you find. I personally don’t think evil is obscuring things for me because I’ve gotten pretty good at using the introspection features of emacs to look at what everything is doing. The guide from noctuid was a good reference when I read it https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide.

Set aside a little bit of time to learn properly how Emacs and evil-mode work together. Not sure if you've seen it, but here's an excellent guide for transitioning from Vim to Emacs with evil-mode. It's by the author/maintainer of general.el.

A bit unrelated to your question, but if you are having trouble with keybindings I really recommend this read. Also, if you use evil-mode, reading evil-guide is really worth it as well, to understand how to configure things correctly.

This should make the porting process easier https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide