Honestly, start with Doom to just get a feel for emacs. Eventually, you might get annoyed with some of its limitations when it comes to customizing your setup.

By the time you reach that point you’ll have an idea of what can be done with emacs and this is where you finally make the switch to vanilla.

You can even make it so you have your vanilla stuff in a separate folder, so you can make it more usable bit by bit, while still having access to doom.