If you get up to mass-scale production quantities, $100 might be feasible. I imagine small-scale production with little up-front capital and no guaranteed market might be lot more challenging. It's not software, you're going to need large orders to get good prices.

I think about Meego/Jolla phone and tablet, Ubuntu Phone, Kobol Helios and tons of other projects that have either failed or are struggling due to market size and ecosystem.

I've been running a Turris Omnia for the last few years, which I've been fairly happy with. Network performance is about average and the platform as a whole is certainly due for an update, but stability has been great, it receives regular upgrades, and I'm happy to pay more for a project that has an open mindset. Not sure many feel the same way about commodity network hardware though.

Even brand new routers, with all their markup, shipping included, that can already run openwrt, can be $64

https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-AC1750-Smart-Router-Gigabit/d... https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/r6350

Here is a new router for $30 with 5 gigabit ports and usb 3.0 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082HH24YY/

Because everything other than the ancient arm CPUs and ethernet ports requires expertise and capital.

First, that doesn't make sense when there are full modern system boards that sell for a fraction of that individually.

Second, why would you need something different that what routers are already doing? They are just trying to sell their own openWRT routers, the hardware has existed for a decade at or below $100, why would it be difficult for them to meet that?

They aren’t just trying to sell a router, they are trying to make available a fully open router without blobs right from boot, that is unbrickable, and selling it essentially at cost

Where are the numbers here? How does what you are saying connect to what is being talked about in a concrete way? You are talking about software and saying it has to cost $100 or more while there are $30 routers on amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082HH24YY/

This is more or less discussed in the link. They started looking at BananaPi products as a starting point, but have some requirements that existing boards don't fulfill. One in particular that probably precludes all of the $30 boards you're talking is:

"that this router isabeautiful (sic) example of excellent GPL/LGPL compliance"

These routers are crap. Anyone who cares a tiny bit about their wireless connectivity won't buy this. And I don't think OpenWRT wants to associate their name with "low-quality" routers.

What you are saying here is speculation. Most router's shortcoming is software. I've used cheap netgear routers with openwrt and they work incredibly well.

Anything with radio involves a ton of expensive certification work.

With something like a rpi that sells millions of units, that can be spread over way more units than something like this that (optimistically) gets sold to a few thousand nerds and that's it.