dune is quite weird compared to many other build tools, but once you learn how it works it's actually quite simple. opam is a pain in the ass but it's definitely being improved steadily and I've had better experiences with it recently. janestreet core seems more stable now than it has in the past but there are occasionally still some breaking changes. They aren't hard to keep up with if you update with each core release though (only like ~1 for my project in the past year or so). There's also a community movement to work a lot more on the ocaml platform and I'm super excited for this work [1] to get through the pipeline! Especially promising is the work on replacing ocamldoc (which sucks) with odoc (which looks great!). While I think work on the ocaml platform will take some time to come to fruition, the approach they are going for is super empathetic and I wholeheartedly agree with their approach for every facet of the ocaml ecosystem -- build tools, doc generation, lsp, editor integration, opam evolution, and all the stability guarantees they're gradually adding. Really exciting time to invest in ocaml!