After much waffling I've decided to stop using use-package in my #emacs config and do things the old-fashioned way. I'm noticing small but consistent speed-ups (according to emacs-init-time) that as far as I can tell are just from moving my config to with-eval-after-load. I'm a little surprised because I used :defer t pretty much everywhere in use-package except for forms with :binds and :hooks.