It would be really cool if they could split out 2.5G networking to all the Pis, but with the current generation of Pi it only has one PCIe lane, so you'd have t

It would be really cool if they could split out 2.5G networking to all the Pis, but with the current generation of Pi it only has one PCIe lane, so you'd have to add in a PCIe switch for each Pi if you still wanted those M.2 NVMe slots... that adds a lot of cost and complexity. Failing that, a 2.5G external port would be the simplest way to make this thing more viable as a storage cluster board, but that would drive up the switch chip cost a bit (cutting into margins). So the last thing would be allowing management of the chip (I believe this Realtek chip does allow it, but it's not exposed anywhere), so you could do link aggregation... but that's not possible here either. So yeah, the 1 Gbps is a bummer. Still fun for experimentation, and very niche production use cases, but less useful generally.