Okay, I guess after dropping some time into learning all the native emacs combinations, it's usable in it's pure form, without evil and all the spacemacs hydras.

But it's a steep learning curve.
E.g. I still can't figure out, why it doesn't respect my "grp:switch" option (second layout while ralt is pressed) -- I can't write any russian in it now :(

Or autocompletion in elisp just sucks. (srsly, C-M-i?)

(shift-alt does work as compose key for some reason)