Designing CM4 Carriers with medium smt level experience. Looking for experience and resources.

[/RaspberryPi]

Hey, I work as a creative technologist in building functional product prototypes. I've been using Raspberry Pis for years, attaching everything from motors, sensors, displays, charge controllers and batteries while writing back- and frontends to simulate the behavior of future products. Most of these run web technology interfaces designed by my fellow interface design colleagues. So far, I've been mostly using finished modules from adafruit and similar while designing and ordering PCBs from well known Chinese manufacturers mostly to reduce the amount of cables, shrink in size and place some diodes, capacitors and resistors here and there for different purposes. So I am familiar with basic electronics knowledge and I'm able to use pcb design software. I've got a well equipped electronics prototyping workshop and a hotplate at the office.
For an upcoming project, I need to go down in size by a lot while keeping the stats from a Pi4 with 8 gigs of ram that works well with what we've built so far.
Now the big question: I've been looking into CM4s lately because these would just barely fit our prototype in width. I know that I would need to design a carrier board and break out whatever functionality I need. This would mostly include breaking out all pins to a FFC connector to attach a hyperpixel display, USB lines to attach a USB camera with the cables cut off, a 5 or 3.3v input, some i2c lines and a multiplexer.
I've been digging into information on how to design these boards and I've been looking into some schematics for carrier boards. From what it looks like on first sight, this seems very doable. I need a couple of pull ups and capacitors and a jumper to flash the eMMC. All of which I could mostly copy from public schematics.
But: I read about working with CM4s being very hard and only intended for professionals. It's said that there are many traps to fall into. Since I can't dive into this for weeks, would you guys say, that breaking out some basic stuff is doable for a medium experience individual like me?
Are there any of you who designed Carriers so far? What's your experience in designing those? Also any good resources, guides, etc you can recommend? :)

submitted by /u/MrInka
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