Hi Mickey, ah no -- you've done WAY more than me in this area! I had been meaning to try your combobulate package.
FWIW: after 20 years of Emacs I personally switched to VSCode a couple of years ago because I felt that in Emacs I was missing out on the LSP experience that VSCode provided in Rust, Typescript, Scala, etc. (I was using Eglot). In any case, there's a very nice Emacs emulation mode in VSCode
and I'm working on porting my favorite paredit function, paredit-kill. Unfortunately that's the one where the paredit author left this comment in the code:
;;; Please do not try to understand this code unless you have a VERY
;;; good reason to do so. I gave up trying to figure it out well
;;; enough to explain it, long ago.
