Just noting that according to the Pi Foundation/Pi Trading, they do sell 44% of their boards to industrial customers[1], so education is definitely a primary goal, but they do have a much broader audience, and I'm sure that influences some of the decisions about what hardware and price points to target.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/for-industry/

That figure is amazing.

I interviewed in person at a leading industrial automation company over five years ago. They were looking for someone to work on ARM stuff and I was (naively) proud of the work I'd done with the original Raspberry Pi in school. The hiring manager had never even heard of the Pi...

Things have changed a lot since then. One of the well-known names in industrial automation, Opto-22, now has adapters to connect their hardware to raspberry pi. And they're not the only one.

http://developer.opto22.com/pi/

They don’t need to, but the desire to see it is understandable. Raspi is the de facto ARM linux box. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, it’s performant. If you have a niche interest then the platform that it’s been developed and tested on is raspi. That’s far more valuable than a $10 savings on a $30 computer.

I don't understand this divide. Why people shouldn't have access to "pro" level tools for education? I had plenty of instances in my life when I tried to do something with consumer tools only to be disappointed and giving up, but later on re-discovering the topic with better tools that lead me to some great results. Cost of low end nvme drives is getting closer to more expensive SD cards now (which are not meant to be used as a hard drive). I see no reason why RPi shouldn't release an update with nvme slot and even dropping SDCard slot altogether.

We used terrible and old tools at uni, so the value of the degree is questionable