...And your point is fair - a lot of the difficulty to me comes from fighting with CMake, which, due to the fact that I don't support a large number of applicat

...And your point is fair - a lot of the difficulty to me comes from fighting with CMake, which, due to the fact that I don't support a large number of applications that rely on it is a piece of technology that I don't retain enough knowledge on when I end up having to use it to be particularly strong at working with. I remember one of the most frustrating incidents that I had with Hunter was, indeed, a CMake issue of my own (well kind-of) causing. On a one-off machine I was running a build on, I was getting signature failures every time Hunter went to download code. I checked everything (and, of course, there were signature-related things that looked like they might be a problem but probably weren't). It turned out that the cmake binary on this host was not compiled with SSL support. I guess the folks who wrote error messages for earlier C++ compilers wrote error messages for Hunter/CMake, because at no point did any error offer any hint about the binary lacking SSL and it wasn't until I decided to download the source code to the latest CMake (because the packaging system I was using didn't have the latest). I can't remember the completely specifics (i.e. if hunter/cmake relied on cURL and it was libcurl/curl itself lacking SSL support), but I remember I happened upon the solution by accident while reviewing the compiler flags of the current version of the installed bits to figure out what to use to build the latest version and I realized that the URL to the dependency was https and there was no way that was going to work without the --enable-whatever flag required to support TLS :). So yes, it's possible I am or have been blaming hunter when I should be blaming cmake, or more accurately, my lack of knowledge in using both tools. At the same time -- and I know this is a really unfair comparison -- I support very few things in Python or node, however, the grief I encounter when I return to that tooling is minimal. It requires a lot less out of me to get things working even in complex applications.