External dependencies are the pain, I don't see any way in which Boost is special. I've had commercial projects relying on 50-100 external tools and libraries (it was in digital forensics) and Boost certainly wasn't the worst to deal with.
I honestly hope that Boost aims for something better than not the worst library to deal with It just clearly shows how broken the situation is. Bottom line. While Boost is a fantastic project, it can really be a nightmare for long running projects and there are a huge number of examples. So instead of covering it with "it is the Boost way" or "you can manage by putting it all into a container" and other "workarounds" What is needed is fixing the policies and creating some LTS versions... I don't understand how it isn't the _obvious_ thing for any SW developer. My $0.02 Artyom