Bitcoin Core's own documentation recommends building from source if you want the latest code, full control over feature flags, and a real understanding of what's actually running on your machine. That's a fair trade — but the build system makes almost every non-trivial feature an opt-in flag rather than a default, which means it's easy to produce a binary that compiles cleanly and runs fine while silently missing something you'll need three steps later. This is a guide to the failure categories