Fair enough, I came from a background of JavaScript and Python, and Lisp was entirely foreign to me, let alone Elisp.
> After all, why "reinvent the wheel"?
I think its not of "reinvent the wheel", but let the other person do the decision making for you, including picking packages, setting up the modeline, so on and so forth. Starting out with a bare Emacs installation, you have to piece together the various packages that you would want to use, where as with Doom, you get everything out of the box. Also, maintaining your own init.el helps one learn Elisp
> I still find myself reading its source to figure out how Henrik approached a solution
For example?