I guess it depends on your use case and on your expectations. It took me about as much time to set up my RPi 2 as it takes to set up a new Linux VM, and since then it lies peacefully on top of a wardrobe, and I just connect over SSH to it. Rarely I need to reboot it :).

I wanted to set up the pi as a wifi repeater. This sort of thing required lots of reboots. Took way too long to setup.

I think the way it should work is they need an emulator that runs on a desktop machine. Just like iOS & Android development. You get your setup working on the desktop & then deploy to device.

I guess the main problem with this is that often you want to try hardware that only works on the pi. Not sure what the solution is there.

Maybe soon these $5 computers will be screaming fast with fast SSD as well, will reboot in a few seconds, and so no problems.

If you do want to play with it as a wifi repeater, perhaps another OS is a good idea? Something like openwrt https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspber... should be quick to write to the SD-card and quick to boot. Raspbian may be a bit heavy.

If your use case is comparable to a desktop machine, maybe the RPi isn't the best choice for you. You'd get a lot more power from an old laptop, though obviously in a larger form-factor.

I found the Pi1's to be unusable as a desktop but thought the Pi2 was pretty good. Which Pi are you talking about?

I have a B+. Is that a 1 or a 2?

A 1