The Highly Liquid board is quite versatile as well, provided you become familiar with creating SysEx strings. From what I’ve seen in the forums, John from Highly Liquid appears to be very helpful in creating these.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply to a difficult question.

Would you say that Livid and Hale have firmware programming interfaces that basically allow you to wire up any kind of input, within the specs of the brain, and then just assign where you want those values to go in the midi world, via their point and click GUI’s?

Economies of Scale are self-explanatory. For example, Arduinos are plentiful and cheap because they’ve been co-opted by a larger DIY movement.
Features can be broken into two simple categories: amount of input/output capability and native USB compatibility.
Usability relates to the amount of effort required to get the board working with a single sensor.

Based on the above, I think the market has balanced itself pretty well. There are some price anomalies, but most of those parts are from the pre-USB>MIDI generation.

To put it simply for “curious, newbie builders:” if you want the scope of your DIY project to be “how do I wire this knob to the board?,” you should spend more than $70 on your MIDI brain. If you want to expand the scope of your project to include programming of the board, you can get away with spending much less.

“Amount of Hassle” is difficult to quantify for a general audience. It all depends on the amount of value you put on your free time.

How much more “solder-n-play” are the more expensive boards, versus an Arduino w/ a midi shield, for instance? Given your last comment about Arduino, (and the multitude of midi arduino projects out there) I’m guessing it wouldn’t be too much of a hassle to get the arduino to behave like a MIDI-builder wants it to.

On the other hand, I’m really here for the music, and I view software programming as a necessary time expense, but not a pleasure, the way physical building/modding/hacking is.

This is a new development — previously you needed to employ annoying “wrappers” and “loopback interfaces” to get an Arduino to speak MIDI.