Yup. Everything you say is true. I would add though there are a couple places in the low end where one or two cents seem to matter. Or at least product manager

Yup. Everything you say is true. I would add though there are a couple places in the low end where one or two cents seem to matter. Or at least product managers think that it matters. In the mid-range, RISC-V providers (certainly SiFive) are pushing the idea that it's easy/easier to add custom logic to your RISC-V based die. I'm not able to judge whether that's really true, but since they're starting with a clean slate in terms of interface logic then maybe. I can't imagine it being harder to add your own tile to a RISC-V design than an ARM design. The tools seem to me to be pretty primitive, though. IAR says they'll have a compiler soonish. GCC still emits some "not completely great" code. (I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not horrible, but compared to the mature toolchains like ARM, Intel & MIPS, it's kind of bad.) Though it's certainly getting better over time. If you look at the architecture though, it does seem a bit easier to implement than ARM and there's more to open designs than just the "free as in beer" argument. RISC-V seems to be appealing to people who have a strong desire to "play around with" an architecture or a solution or are financially motivated to add logic that's somehow hard to add to ARM.