I've never had the problem of anything not working on any of my recompiled kernels. What i am aiming for is a kernel in which i am able to remove every module/built-in that is redundant on my machine. Right now, on bootup the cpu cores show 15-20% usage and the Cpu core temps. are over 60°C. It takes a couple of minutes before they come down to something like 53-55°C and the cpu usage drops.
Up until the kernel 4.4 series, i used @m_yate's kernel upgrade guide in the Sticky here but since the 4.6 series i've been following this guide. It compiles the kernel a lot faster and doesn't create the linux-image-dbg, linux-firmware-image, etc., packages which he has omitted to tell us what to do with.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-...-linux-kernel/

@kcirick For those of us who are not linux or linux kernel pros nor have any such pretensions, beginning with a config file of a working installation and then trimming it seems a much more viable option than with a bare bones config created with make defconfig.