The track record of the chipmaker is the important thing, to me. It's not always clear cut. I think now there may be a more formal relationship, but Allwinner used to have good support from purely volunteer Bay Libre.

I'm far from certain but part of me wants to believe that's in sizable part also Allwinner doing a less ship, less ultra-forked job in the first place when they dump their own ugly gross hacked out vendor tree fork, where-as many of these vendor trees are just wildly awful.

Again, just to reiterate, I would never ever use board count as an indicator. Especially these days where there are only 2-4 (at best) chips available for use. Of course there's lots of sbc with this chip: the specs are great, the performance appears impressive, & there's literally no other chips to buy. That the vendor kernel is garbage & maybe there are oodles of little design bugs is like, not a big impediment to releasing hardware. Alas.