Hey rjkirk,
Thanks for the feedback and extensive writeup!
Yes my intent as stated many times before was to make a radio enabled arduino that would be very compact yet still have all the functionality/pins exposed for other makers to include in their project. Both R2 (RFM12B) and R3 (RFM69W/HW) have their target markets and applications. The RFM69 comes in a high power variant which has the same pinout (RFMHW). This will be available in my store very soon, it has 20dBm output vs 13dBm of the RFM69W. So it will have that extra power boost for longer range, at the expense of more TX current of course.
I believe the RFM69HW would be the equivalent of RFM22B/BP, not really sure, but believe me ... with the HW you will run out of space in open air before you can run out of range on a drone (see the RFM69 intro video i made).
I would love Moteino to get into drone projects, I just don't have the time to spend to market it and such. I am 1 man operation still, a side job, not a main job. So I am relying on the community to spread the word and slowly it picks up if it's a quality product which I am hearing a lot that it is. Lots of people praise Moteino for what it is, which is both exciting and humbling for me.
On the Atmega32u4 front ... that is an odd cat and it was hard to make by hand. So not sure how much I would be able to mass produce it. I have a much easier time to produce R2/R3 than Leo.
I use the free Eagle at the moment, all my projects are small boards, which is something I'm always looking for because small PCB = low cost to make.
Hackvana is great, I mean you may not get the top quality you get at a US reputable maker, but you also won't pay outrageous prices. I think the prices are very competitive and compelling. I have ditched Itead/SeedStudio for hackvana, hopefully Mitch will keep up and improve his service. I think he has a lot to gain given so many startups and individual makers need a consistent reliably and good quality PCB maker, which in my opinion was an issue before hackvana. I tried many services, 4pcb, batchpcb, itead, seed, oshpark....
OSHPark is good too, but it's a prototyping service, so it's good for checking your boards, mass producing becomes VERY expensive at OSHPark unfortunately, and you're stuck with purple (which I heart he will expand to more colors ..) and ENIG finish which I personally dislike and really prefer HASL over ENIG (yeah .. gold looks nice on purple but it's a huge myth floating around that it's easier to solder by hand).
I cannot provide too much software because there's a million cool projects out there and I'm trying to stay focused. What I can do is provide hardware. I hope the RFM69 will take off and become a good alternative to RFM12B. The lib i released I believe is the first for the Arduino platform so I hope/expect others to test it and improve it and build stacks on top of it for drones and other applications.
There's several DIO (interrupts) on the RFM69, of which I only use the single one that's relevant to packet handling. That's cause I'm not really interested in continuous and other modes this module offers. Those modes might be ok for video or streaming or things like that, but they also don't have the cool features of packet handling which I really want. Packet handling opens the door for a lot of things I don't want to code for in firmware, which means more reliability.
I hope I addressed all your questions, but the discussion is open ended, thanks again