brent what is better, compiling from source and installing your own binary or compiling from source and building your own eopkg?
2nd one is nice once you wrap your head around it. It uses a "package recipe" you write called package.yml
creating a reproducible build which happens inside a clean chroot environment potentially avoiding the need to install some dependencies only needed at build time to your root system and ultimately if you did it correctly creating a .eopkg that can be installed and managed by the package manager for future removal and easy sharing amongst multiple of your systems with less manual steps.
But unless you plan on doing this a lot and/or contributing as a package maintainer for Solus, then don't worry about learning it. It just puts extra learning between yourself and your goal and may require additional learning as the build system matures over time.
But of course if you enjoy playing around, go for it.