What’s your thought process in choosing the right one?
It’s a lot easier to choose the right dev board if you’ve first put together a good block diagram. You should iron out what major functions you need and, very importantly, what interfaces are required. Here are some tips for making a solid block diagram.
Then you can look at all the popular dev boards available and sort them based on I/O features, compute horsepower, power consumption, and perhaps most importantly, what kind of community has been built to support the dev board. We made this handy comparison chart of the top dev/proto boards today.
Here’s more info on what the point of a dev board is.