You have got to be kidding!
No RF here. And both devices have fine pitch.
I wasn't comparing different options, I'm just saying that as an individual thing, you would have to be a million times better an EE than software before programming an AD9102 became comparable in difficulty to correctly designing and assembling a board with an AD9102 on it. Maybe you are a million times better at EE than programming, but I would suggest you shouldn't assume everyone else on here is the same.
SPI double mode argument is BS. By default interface is plain 3 wire SPI.
This. MarkF, you're looking at every part of this, and assuming the absolute worst. I'm not talking out of ignorance, I've used this device in the past. I made it extra complicated for myself by requiring that I could output different frequencies, synchronized with a pulse output by a separate microcontroller, such that the 0 of the sin coincided with the end of the microcontroller pulse. It was a while ago now, but I recall spending a whole day figuring out an issue which turned out to be having my SCLK and MOSI backwards or something like that, and then I had this going in no time at all:
The fact that each bit has a one-line description is a GOOD THING. It means the operation of each piece of the device is simple, and the great flexibility of the device as a whole comes from the varied ways you can plug those pieces together. There's plenty of examples outlining the main features, so you have far more to work with that just one line descriptors.
If you expect the datasheet to be a Stack Overflow-style guide that has every possible thing you can imagine already figured out for you, then it'd be 1000 pages long.
If you just invest a little time in understanding the design decisions behind the AD9102, the datasheet makes beautiful sense. YMMV I suppose.