Well, yea, it's a bit unfortunate that you had this experience with WHDL_Opener but IMHO it should be the responsibility of this specific package to at least hint at where to get those additional tools if they are required.

I agree that the SDK is rather huge for the common user needs if just some parts of the toolchain are required.
Maybe we should offer some way to install commonly used tools of the GNU toolchain but allow to skip the compilers or just generate some separate package with only some of the most popular GNU toolchain utilities.
This could cause other undesired implications, though and needs some afterthought.

Using Linux or other OS as reference for user experience but calling our optional SDK too huge to install is probably also not the correct perspective in terms of storage space requirements, though. Our goal was always to keep a very small footprint OS although we were in a bit of a conflict lately with all those requirements that came along with e.g. a browser application like Wayfarer.
Thanks for your suggestions, anyway.

We might strengthen our support for full legacy emulation in the future but that was not our main focus while improving on the project. There seems to be quite some interest into that direction by users who are invested into MorphOS lately, though.