Hey you got it absolutely right.. i do these project for fun, as learning experiences, as self challenges and to keep the creative juices flowing.. it's how I enjoy spending my time and money haha
A good way to make that better is building one's own OS image. Once you get the scripts running (which is fairly easy), you can customize them to your liking, preinstall your software and config, etc. There's a lot of opportunities to save power and make the bootup quicker if you look through the scripts.