"the camera cores are (mostly) very well documented and software support is good."
I have seen some good documents, but they are mostly tailored to OEMs as well. It also depends on what you want to do. I've been trying to get a lepton streaming video to a TFT screen using an ESP32. Resources are scares. If you hit a problem, you're basically on your own.
Hmm from my experience the Software IDD is pretty good, but ultimately it's not designed as a consumer part. (I am the author of flirpy which is aimed at more end user applications but I've not added low level support for the Lepton yet)
I have seen some good documents, but they are mostly tailored to OEMs as well. It also depends on what you want to do. I've been trying to get a lepton streaming video to a TFT screen using an ESP32. Resources are scares. If you hit a problem, you're basically on your own.