ESP32 Forum

I understand using Arduino you are using a precompiled version of ESP-IDF.
There are so may great settings in menuconfig that I miss when I am forced to use Arduino over ESP-IDF.
Why does it have to be precompiled ? Why can't it be imported and compiled along with my code so that we can use menuconfig?

Arduino is designed for education and rapid application development. The vast majority of users are going to prefer simplicity over customization. It is not a trivial task to align the versions of IDF and arduino-esp32.
Espressif provides the lib-builder (https://github.com/espressif/esp32-arduino-lib-builder/) to make it easy to set up an environment where you can compile you own esp-idf libraries with arduino-esp32.
I build docker containers (https://hub.docker.com/r/lbernstone/esp ... ib-builder) if you want a quicker way to just make a couple menuconfig changes on a release version.
Platformio is often able to compile idf and arduino-esp32 together with an IDE. You will have to look on their site for guidance on that.