I didn't set out to avoid official ESP32 developer boards. In the beginning, the DevKitC was my default. It's the board that shows up in every tutorial, the one Espressif clearly intended as a starting point. So I bought a couple, wired them up on breadboards, and started building projects. But somewhere along the way, I realized that what I was buying weren't always official boards anyway, and as I branched out to things like the XIAO line from Seeed Studio, the gap between "official reference design" and "tool I actually want to use" became hard to ignore.

To be clear, it wasn't the price that was the problem for me. Third-party boards from reputable vendors aren't typically cheaper, and in most cases they're actually more expensive. What you're paying for is the stuff around the chip: battery charging, better connectors, basically just a form factor that doesn't fight you.

None of this should come across as being anti Espressif. Espressif makes fantastic chips, and their official boards serve an important purpose. However, these reference designs are for, well, reference. Third-party boards often feel a lot closer to being a finished developer tool rather than a physical manifestation of documentation that an official Espressif board tends to feel like. The base boards are great, but for any project you want to build, a third-party board is likely to suit your needs a whole lot better.