The problem is that all these routers and a lot of the embedded stuff don't get updates due to shitty vendor drivers for a lot of components. Most of the work

The problem is that all these routers and a lot of the embedded stuff don't get updates due to shitty vendor drivers for a lot of components. Most of the work on LEDE/OpenWRT is from volunteers that just want to make it work. Usally these devices/boards ship with an SDK from the manufacturer that is often based on OpenWRT but has some hard dependency on an ancient kernel, non-GPL sources or messy GPL drivers that need a lot of work until they can be upstreamed to the kernel. That beeing said, LEDE is not only for routers - I think the ubus/procd/netifd system is pretty great - there is uhttpd-mod-ubus that allows you to configure everything via json-rpc (also websocket support is coming) Maybe the tradeoffs from LEDE to run with fine with a current kernel/userland on 32mb (or even 16mb ram) / 4mb flash devices might make it more complicated to use it as general purpose system.