"The first thing you’ll notice on rebooting is that the trail of cryptic boot messages has (mostly) gone, replaced by a splash screen." The boot messages were

"The first thing you’ll notice on rebooting is that the trail of cryptic boot messages has (mostly) gone, replaced by a splash screen." The boot messages were carefully crafted to be easy to read by children and evocative of the 8-bit computing days when we could see the computer actually working. I think they are part of the magic of the Pi that you could show kids, look the mouse is being connected now, and such. Booting an iPad is a black box, the Pi by comparison is there to pull back the veil and inclusion of a splash screen for aesthetics does the project a disservice. TLDR; Splash screen is a step backwards, otherwise congrats for all your efforts.