I've recently been making prototype boards using the toner transfer process. While it's not super simple, it does allow me to whip up a layout in Eagle, print it to the transfer paper, laminate, etch, etc. and get something pretty nice for a prototype/breadboard in only a few hours. The advantage of a 'design specific' board is that you can optimize the ground foil and traces, as well as handle really tiny SMD devices without much hassle. It's hard for me to imagine a generic board layout that could be close to optimal for any high performance circuit, so the 'custom layout' route seems to be better for me. It also gives me a lot of experience handling SMD footprints and layout issues - if I can get a board to work well with my relatively sloppy toner transfer system, it seems more likely to work with a real, professionally manufactured board.
The drawback of the toner transfer process is that I'm basically limited to a single sided layout. I've found some SMD jumpers that I can use to coerce a complex layout into a single side board, and they basically work, but it's not as nice as a real custom PCB.
Still, I find that I can now lay out a PCB, just to test the circuit out and see what makes it work or fail, and I can do this fairly quickly at home, speeding up the 'design, breadboard, tweak, refine' loop. The nice part of a board like this is that I can breadboard some pretty high precision circuits, using some finicky parts that need good layouts, grounding, and bypassing. I can't imagine this being easy with a generic layout, unless the 'generic' part is specific to a few circuits that you want to work on. Maybe that's the case for you, but for me, the loop of 'design, build, evaluate' makes my goals change somewhat often, and it's hard to imagine a fixed breadboard PCB that could continue to be useful despite the inevitable (and desired) design changes that happen.
Just my $0.02… best of luck!
The drawback of the toner transfer process is that I'm basically limited to a single sided layout. I've found some SMD jumpers that I can use to coerce a complex layout into a single side board, and they basically work, but it's not as nice as a real custom PCB.
Still, I find that I can now lay out a PCB, just to test the circuit out and see what makes it work or fail, and I can do this fairly quickly at home, speeding up the 'design, breadboard, tweak, refine' loop. The nice part of a board like this is that I can breadboard some pretty high precision circuits, using some finicky parts that need good layouts, grounding, and bypassing. I can't imagine this being easy with a generic layout, unless the 'generic' part is specific to a few circuits that you want to work on. Maybe that's the case for you, but for me, the loop of 'design, build, evaluate' makes my goals change somewhat often, and it's hard to imagine a fixed breadboard PCB that could continue to be useful despite the inevitable (and desired) design changes that happen.
Just my $0.02… best of luck!