But we've already established that these are meant for "the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools and in developing countries". In these situations with young, untrained hands, durability and robustness are absolutely key criteria. It's not good value if it ends up discarded/broken due to additional complexity or a fault.

I did mention "similar usage profiles"

Or maybe you're using Pis in ways that aren't so hard on SD cards, etc? It seems very likely that this is the case given that these users experience these issues on Pis but not other systems.