Eh, my experience with the orange pi zero was similar. But then I've been playing with debian on embedded boards since the NSLU2 days, so I guess I'm probably a little blind to the challenges.
Any build that doesn't start with a multimeter, a soldering iron and a TTL->USB cable is pretty straightforward...
Nice, I had two slugs. The community and Wiki were awesome. I eventually ended up adding a page about soldering a USB wireless card on to one of the unused USB headers on one. The other ran my website and an email server.
Any build that doesn't start with a multimeter, a soldering iron and a TTL->USB cable is pretty straightforward...