A vast majority of these boards use chips made for mobile phones to keep the costs down - so we have to make do with what these chips have. Which is why they support 2 or 3 camera buses, WiFi, LVDS, HDMI, Bluetooth, SD, but usually no SATA, no PCIe lanes, no Ethernet (it's often a USB device like on the Pi).

The Pi is pretty much the only one with the sales numbers to justify the cost of a customization, but even that would be a small miracle.

ODroids are a great alternative with much better performance and SATA for not much more money (~$55).

The problem is that regular SD cards were made to store photos and music once in a while, not host an entire operating system.

They make high-endurance SD cards that _are_ more reliable and _can_ handle being written to constantly but everyone cheaps out and just gets the cheapest thing on sale from the rainforest retailer and wonders why their cards keep dying.

It's a shame that ongoing support for other SBCs is almost universally poor. Often you're stuck using older, unpatched kernels and broken video drivers.

RPi has binary blobs, but at least they keep supporting boards with software updates

Apparently they will, from someone in IRC I trust:

https://dl.sendcat.com/Aip36fb6Sn5KBIFQEV8xQ7A0X5sdEf5tX5zrL...

"USB3, Gigabit ethernet (proper), and on the higher variants, it will have a a sata port, second hdmi port (for in or out), and a higher end FGPA"

However:

"not 2019 according to ebden"

AFAIK, they haven't really changed any of the RTL except the ARM cores and some of the caching. I don't really see them adding SATA.