Can you elaborate a bit on the dependency-handling topic? I've always thought that Bitbake's dependency handling worked pretty well. It only has package-level granularity, but is quite good within that context.
Bitbake doesn't model all changes that affect packages, so after certain changes, some packages that should be rebuilt, aren't. It is especially prone to happen when changing Bitbake variables (example: MACHINE_FEATURES), and these are a quite common way to change things about the image being built.
