A slight gripe I have with Frontmacs is everything is loaded eagerly on startup. I'd imagine this massively increases start up time given how heavy weight some of the packages are (yasnippet, magit, tide). I also find issues with it calling itself awesome without integrating with any emacs window management package.
Most config in emacs these days is just installing a couple of packages and toggling on and off a couple customizable variables, and occasionally a couple of `add-hook` calls. These are all low hanging fruits since packages became an official thing in Emacs. The most annoying and non-obvious part of Emacs is how it manages windows. To tame the totally insane default window management system, you pretty much have to shop for a layout manager of some sort, and in order to do that, you have to know what Emacs is doing under the hood. That's hard and I wish more of these Emacs distros would come integrated with some sane window management package.
I used to just rely on popwin and desktop mode mainly, and used golden-ratio and centered-window-mode for a while. Recently I've completely ripped them out of my config and replaced them with [purpose](https://github.com/bmag/emacs-purpose) and [perspective](https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el). I'm loving them so far, others seem to like e2wm, tile, rotate and others.
[1]: https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs [2]: https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/cus...
If you don't need workspace specific buffers, eyebrowse[1] is a good (seemingly less buggy) alternative.
As well as using C-x 2 and C-x 3, I've started using perspective.el (https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el), which means I can switch between different projects each with their own buffer set and window configuration, as well as switch to an IRC perspective. It's such a well-executed extension, definitely recommend it if you've never tried it.