There will be more work involved, but the potential is there for some very impressive results. As with many questions, that depends. The cheapest solutions usually involve purchasing a bare circuit board or kitset, and building it yourself. The plug and go solution is more costly but eliminates assembly and hardware problems. The most common problem would be the untimely death of a critical component.
Electronic components are pretty robust and very long lived when treated with respect and care.
Unfortunately, when taking the cheapest track and building your own hardware, there are many more things that can cause problems. One design or construction fault is usually quite easy to find. When you have two or more at the same time, many frustrating hours, or days of fault finding pass before things are rectified or you call for more expert assistance. Most applications do not require the latest generation of high speed micro. A 4MHz clock on just about any of the currently available microcontrollers should be enough for most things.