This is the way. While I do rebind plenty keys to enhanced or do-what-I-mean versions, I'm careful to avoid fundamentally change the meaning of any of the vanilla keys. So I see my config as more of a progressive enhancement over `emacs -q` or `mg` and I can still work with them just fine (if somewhat less comfortably).

Being able to work with `emacs -q` is also important to me for extending Emacs. It's easy to partially roll back a change if I break something in my config, and I can test out new elisp code against base Emacs.