I was in the same place you were a month ago but I decided to just bite the bullet and build my own Neovim configuration from scratch. Fortunately I don't use auto-complete and an LSP was only a recent addition to my configuration. Telescope was one of the few plug-ins I configured off the bat and when you start small learning the eco-system isn't that much of a hurdle.

The Nvim Kickstart Project is a great starting point for your configuration and has it's config file heavily commented to teach you how to setup your own configuration, I highly recommend it.