Hm, also some features (e.g. USB C/3.1 headers) were only available on high-end gaming MoBos for quite a long time, making the whole build power-hungry and needlessly fragile.

Before that, MoBo manufacturers even made extensive use of additional chips for networking, USB, mora SATA ports, RAID and what not, which could make the whole system more complicated/fragile (all the additional drivers!).

I nowadays try to avoid that and aim for boards close to "reference" (whatever the chipset offers out of the box).