Hi @ptillisch 
We (ESP32 core devs and contributors) have long thought of possible ways to optimize the board menu. Here are a few reasons why we have not been able to do it so far (based on chip or manufacturer):
- Boards in the group can not have predefined properties, like flash size, PSRAM available, etc if all in the group are not defined. If one requires selection, all will have it.
- Boards can not have custom values for some of the menus (ex. We have boards that require custom, non-standard upload speeds or they will not work)
- Some boards have specific custom menus. Those also would not fit in the scheme
We also thought of splitting the chips into separate packages, while using the same core, but worry that the many ESP32 related libraries will stop working, because defines and other things would change. Will also not solve the fact that we already have many ESP32 based boards that would still end up in one of the packages. It would only temporarily "fix" the problem for some of the chips, until more boards come out with them.