I too have a (fairly) strong emotional bias towards pine products. I can tell you why. For one, pine is the only manufacturer I know of that managed to obtain and release real down to register level documentation for the hardware they use. We have very comprehensive documentation from rockchip (a lot of it in Chinese, but auto translation tools are good enough). They publish schematics for everything. They let you download source code for so called "proprietary" drivers that work with old versions of Linux kernel.
All this means, for a tinkerer/hobbyist one can do stuff that is simply impossible on any other hardware that has comparable performance (basically modern 64bit embedded systems like those in newest mobile phones).
Then there is all the time we(hobbyists/devs) spend tinkering with this hardware. When one invests so much time into some product it is hard to just let it go.
However, having said all that I would never use an unfinished product as my main phone. If I had a pine phone I woukd probably carry it as a secondary, but those devices are nowhere near the state people can rely on them in case of emergency.