spacemacs and other approaches for organizing emacs packages

Hi everyone, I've been looking to update the mess that is my .emacs file. Looking around, there are many new Evil packages and new ways of managing them. I've come across the following as a rather ambitious way to integrate Evil into many modes: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs Anyone have an opinion on it? I'm trying it briefly. I like the discover-ability, but it's a lot of new muscle memory to learn. Any other suggestions for organizing .emacs? I mainly use Org, ESS, and of course Evil.