IMO there is many other dev boards than rpi at reasonable prices that could do the job if someone were to spend a few months working on it, ones with more memory, faster disk interfaces, usb-c sockets and usb3.2, onboard ethernet, etc etc
Discussion
That's cool. I'm ignorant of that stuff.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/04/03/top-5-most-powerful-arm-sbcs-devkits/ this is just a little sample of some from a couple years back
If you need a pi, it’s for the gpio interface. The expectation should be it’s a cheap little piece of shit for down and dirty nitty gritty development work that touches a breadboard for some temporary purpose.
As for other dev boards, no pleb should even know they exist imo. Plebs should be laptop maxing.
laptops are fine and all but you haven't seen what these little pocket sized things can do, and very often they run on USB power, you could have a whole home server rig in one with a fat storage raid device just a couple boxes in the corner next to your router, with a UPS keeping it all up and running and a failover for mobile connection so your LN doesn't get force closed on by a half hour outage
Plebs won’t be doing all that, that’s all. I’m king of table scrap electronics & software solutions, I enjoy those things, but not at scale.