True, USB IO deadlocks and power usage causing drops/freeze made me stop using it. It was a surprise how many things can go wrong when you're out of the comfort of an industrial brand built PC board.
That's where I see the issues crop up. "Uncontrolled shutdowns" seem to be a killer of SD cards for me even when using R/O only filesystems.
Wouldn't this be enough of a factor to point the issue towards software and not hardware though?
Honestly I don't know. The rpi is a weird SoC though, and many things are handled in the GPU by a blob, even if it's software it's outside our control.