I don't know. What is your reasoning? I don't really understand why you'd want to force people to upgrade HW when they don't need to.

There is a difference between a design decision reasonable people can disagree, even forcefully, about, and a design decision that is actually a deceptive attempt to get people to buy new hardware.

They spelled out the reasoning in the post:

“in order to support the increased cryptographic loads that we see as part of pfSense verison 2.5, pfSense Community Edition version 2.5 will include a requirement that the CPU supports AES-NI”

You may disagree with that but it's intellectually dishonest to argue as if they didn't provide clear, technically defensible rationale, especially at a time when much of the industry has been moving to hardware offload.

Wait, your argument is that isn't a way to sell more hardware is that you will do it later, not now?

If we only allowed people to load pfSense on hw that we sell,or have sold, you would have a point.

Since we don't even attempt same, my point stands.

That point no makes sense as this decision cuts out a lot of the cheaper hardware people ran pfSense on previously so when they look at their options now your own lower priced stuff becomes more attractive and oh yes it has AES-NI and is fully compatible.

This really feels like a long con to get people to upgrade their hardware to a pfSense unit.