@tetious Thanks Greg. Insight is always useful. I was actually using the ESP-IDF and tje ESP8266 native frameworks for my comparisons. The ESP8266 seemed to lack in that I had to start fixing references to libraries and defines. The ESP-IDF did not seem to have those issues on the simple projects I tried, I am assuming it has had more thought put into it.
I don’t think it is PlatformIO’s problem as such, they just pick up the underlying framework provided by Espressif.
Thanks