The golden mean between "customize literally everything" and "never stray from the basics", imo, is to pick and maintain a stack of blessed +2 vorpal binaries that work well even without any of your dotfiles or n=1 designs being present.
That's why I build off of the programs my Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs. Not everything I use in an average day is in there, but everything I find myself shocked not to have on a new Ubuntu VM out of the box is.