I set up authoritative nameservers at home using unbound, which appears to be considerably easier than configuring BIND, but I still can't say that I fully understand it. DNS (and networking in general) is a bit of a dark art.

At home I have an openbsd box as my network gateway running unbound and nsd. Unbound handles the caching and recursion, nsd handles the local name resolution.

I have a small utility (made up of two shell scripts and a python script) which watches /var/db/dhcpd.leases for changes and parses it to produce the zonefiles for nsd.