They don't strike me as particularly obtuse. But I write a decent amount of C++ already, and I've come to terms with the reality that there is always some assembly required.

Binaries don't strike me as particularly useful for C++ projects. C projects, moreso, but with C++ you've got to support a number of different C++ runtimes per platform (the various MSVCRTs on Windows, libstdc++ and libc++ on OS X) and it's probably just better to have the user--who is going to be the one stuck with it--build it themselves.

The build steps seem to miss the IDE though. The part I was most interested in. I have postponed playing with Polycode until I get that to work on OS X.