Well to be fair, I'd consider this to be semi-HPC work - obviously it's not multi-node but because of the hardware it's not the same as using it on an ordinary desktop machine either and has many of the challenges of HPC too in getting stuff compiled for it, particularly with it being ARM based. What you learn when you work on this stuff is that you need very specific combinations of packages that your distro just isn't going to be able to do, and Homebrew doesn't give you enough flexibility in that.