[jvanderbot]

Agree, these are, from a certain perspective, justified costs.

> I live in the embedded / hardware world but my colleagues working on the higher level software tend think all of the above is necessary for dealing with the hundreds of packages and dependency hell that come with the "modular" robot software approach.

But it's not a huge step to push your packages to debian, and after that rosdep feels totally unnecessary.

> That said, the popular packages in the ecosystem for simulation, planning, robot modeling, etc seem powerful. Community developed ROS "drivers" (middleware integration) are also useful so you don't reinvent the wheel for off the shelf hardware integration.

I agree 100%.