I always found buildroot a lot easier to fathom and harness. And certainly flexible enough with the ability patch every included recipe and package.

Yeah it definitely isn’t straight forward. But it is complicated for good reasons given how much more complicated stuff it does behind the scenes.

A few years ago I had to build a custom embedded image for a high-quality scientific instrument that was going into production, and I made a pass at Yocto - but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the heavy load to get everything in place to do a full build, for the specific SO-DIMM module we were using, so ended up with a custom build script to build the bootable image and all intended embedded applications. This worked out, but I've always been bothered that Yocto didn't pass my first sniff test.

I ended up completing the project on time and under budget by adopting a strict "compiler on-board" approach (i.e. no cross-compiling), so that's where I got a bit dissatisfied with the Yocto approach of having a massive cross-compiling tooling method to deal with.

I'll have to give it another go, but I do find that if I have to have a really beefy machine to get started on an embedded project, somethings' not quite right.