I had a student try to do an independent study research project using the BBB a couple of years ago. The experience wasn't good. We had a lot of trouble getting the thing to run with anything except the one kernel version that it came with. Porting over features from kernel modules done on earlier minor versions was a huge pain and not at all straightforward.
Problem was to support capes (addon boards) especially dynamically and at runtime wasn't really supported in mainline. They had special cape manager patches to do it but it wasn't a good solution for upstream.
3 years later or so we finally have good overlay support for this in a mainline happy and now merged way. They paid to have this work done which is great, though sadly took a long time.
I forget the guys name that did it but he is clearly a champion of patience.
