Our strategy
We will use the following packages:
Hostapd, as the solutions I have seen are using it.
Udhcp instead of DHCP.
We have control over kernel, so we will discuss kernel configurations a bit so that you are able to enable your device.
We will use systemd. Until now, we have been using SysVinit. To get a flavor of systemd, this seems promising for the future.
We will create a recipe to copy our configurations related to the required packages to rootfs.
Tip
We won't be changing the default configuration files of packages. We would rather try to create our own version so that we can refer to the original at any point in time.