Hi, nice to see the vendor participating in the HN discussion (and hopefully gathering feedback from users) :-)

One of the main factors driving me back to the DK board was the fact that many NCS samples take advantage of the 4 switches + 4 LEDs on the DK board. Even the light_switch sample uses all 4 buttons to trigger different functionality.

The smaller boards don't have room for these switches and LEDs, so you'd have to tweak the program to work around the hardware differences. And that's a big investment if you just wanted to play around with the stock sample code for a few minutes.

A more general critique of the NCS samples is that many of them require a great deal of "polishing" before you can use them in a real project. It would actually be helpful if NCS shipped ready-made overlays that allowed them to run on smaller boards like the MDK and Dongle, in a configuration that's closer to what a shippable product would look like. As it stands, a company that wants to ship a Zigbee bulb or switch has to do a lot of work to convert the samples into something usable.

Maybe this is worth filing some PRs on the sdk-nrf github.