See, to me that sounds like RPi is the only board with a working software ecosystem, active contributors, and available source code to help get your project done.

But that's not really the case.

Depends what you mean by “ecosystem”. If you’re at the level of a hobbyist who’s considers a blog post, Hackaday project, or YouTube tutorial about setting up some server or building some type of project part of the ecosystem, then the difference between the size and accessibility of the RPi and its competitors is staggering.

Sure, for any one project an alternative _may_ be the right solution, especially if you’re spending serious time on it, but when you’re constantly creating little projects and proto-projects, many of which involve little more than copying from a few blog posts, writing a bit of code for an evening or two, and deciding not to go much further, it is just SO much less risky in terms of time and probability of major hiccups to start out on an RPi. Plus, if you’re like me there’s probably one lying around somewhere so you get instant gratification and zero incremental cost to give it a try, which is often the difference between scratching the itch and not on that particular project.

As someone who used to work on embedded hardware day-in and day-out (though it's been close to a decade since I've worked in that sector), I can assure you that really is the case, if you consider a more long-term view.

Every time I look at one of the alternatives to the RPi, I just don't have confidence in the tools and community. I don't want to have to do what I used to do when I worked on embedded hardware for a living. It was fiddly and annoying (though it did have its truimphs), and mainly only tolerable because I was getting paid to do it.

I want a stable, working, well-supported, upstreamed platform that I can build on without too much fuss, and also feel confident that I can keep upgrading the OS and kernel to whatever is the latest, for the next 5-10 years, even if the company behind it disappears.

I play with this stuff in my spare time, and fighting with a chip vendor's nearly-always-shitty BSP is not what I consider a good use of my time. You (being someone who currently works on this stuff day-in and day-out) are in a very unique position that you can leverage to make it easy and productive for you to build on random hardware platforms, especially the ones that aren't even mainstream RPi competitors; most people posting here about this sort of thing are... not in that position.