I think it’s the simplicity of it that is deceptive; the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands. In particular when the user can detect any early sign of an issue or is good enough to quickly diagnose what’s going wrong, fix it in 5 min and forget about it, it looks like a cute trivial little cheap machine that just works fine.

It takes looking at a kid or less experienced users working through a task for 5~10 mon to realize how much the hardware/software has to be flexible and permissive to make the user successful.