Yes, the SD card sucks massive balls, PSU issues are less of a problem now that most people have decent fastcharge USB lying about now.
The support that the PI is worth _every_ tradeoff. It is not a server, You can use it as one, but you have to spend some money, and do some work.
Yes, I'd love a pi with emmc and proper ethernet. But, I don't want to have to support it myself. Virtually all the other pi clones require significant engineering time from me, _or_ are in a black hole of support, stuck on a hacked version of ubuntu 14/16.
For a real datastore, you need a proper atx board with more than one sata port. That means paying > £200(PSU, case, ram, motherboard). I have one of these, and I don't use it for anything other than storing data(no I don't use own/next cloud. I like my stuff reasonably secure.)
The pi is great for what it is. You're trying to make it do something its not designed to do, and its fighting back.