Mostly have a hope of having a bootloader process that doesn't hinge on binaries. I mean at some level I may have to, but it's really annoying I can't move an image from machine to machine even though the arch is all the same.

But that's not an ARM issue is it? PI has strange boot by GPU but issue is SoC implementation I think not CPU architecture.

Right, it's not CPU arch, but there's a much higher chance of having the entire thing open arch if the CPU is. I expect the probability of reaching a de-facto "standard" SoC to be much higher in RISC-V and I'll take the pain of being the early adopter.

I have a lot of sympathy but fear that RISC-V will lead to even more fragmentation than we see with ARM - eg proprietary extensions. PC standardisation is largely due to the level of control that a couple of dominant vendors have not due to the status of the IP in the core.

>I have a lot of sympathy but fear that RISC-V will lead to even more fragmentation than we see with ARM

Don't fear change, it's a cool thing.

If risc-v ends up fragmented then it will eventually evolve to a couple main vendors having a good level of compatibility between them and then the market will just agree to include those. Whatever the majority uses.

Most likely that board would be using RISC-V extensions, so no juice.

Freedom.