"We have small and fine-tuned ghetto, but customers don't want that. What to do?"
I have similar problem: we have consumer device on top of imx6. I used iMX6 SoloLite evaluation board kit (1GB of memory) with Fedora for arm as development prototype. For me, installing a package is not a problem at all: "dnf install package". I planed to use Raspbian or Fedberry on actual device, but our management blindly switched to Yocto, without comparing of alternatives. To install package on Yocto, we need to create our own recipe in our own layer,then rebuild Yocto, fix bugs and repeat, and then deliver update. We spent man-year to achieve same result as we already had with Fedora. We seriously lag behind schedule because two developers (and two consultants) are working on developing of our own custom OS instead of working on our application. Moreover, instead of single system for development/testing and production (Fedora or Debian on developer workstation, in Docker for CI, on actual device) we now have mix of two systems. I created configuration script with about fifty options to be able to compile for host and for Yocto at same time (including workaround for number of bugs in Yocto). Enormous development time was sink into ground because of this schizophrenia.