This was also the appeal, despite using binary blobs and some incredibly unfortunate design decisions (ethernet over USB for example), people loved these little things because they were cheap to a fault- intended to be almost disposable for education purposes. All can be forgiven with cost saving as the goal.
That has definitely been lost; they are still excellent education devices, but at the pricepoint I would have a pit in my stomach buying a couple hundred for students… assuming I could even get them of course.
They lost their way trying to cater to businesses that wanted Pis to drive digital signage or be the basis of some IoT deployment.
"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity [...] We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110506002027/https://www.raspb...