Emacs 29 introduced the --init-directory command line option, so you can have completely different Emacs instances that don't interfere with each other, loading different modules, ui and what not. You can simply create a shell script for each one and play with different flavors of Emacs. I've done it for example when I changed my completion system from ivy to vertico to see if I liked it (I did).

I have had pretty much the same path as you, and playing around with Emacs lisp is super fun.