I definitely see where you're coming from and I think these are valid points. In my personal experience though, there definitely does exist a market of "price i

I definitely see where you're coming from and I think these are valid points. In my personal experience though, there definitely does exist a market of "price insensitive, as long as it's under x". I think Arduino probably fits in there. I feel like at least based on the quality of some boards vs clones that I have, there are definitely cases where I would have been "fired for not buying Arduino [IBM]" due to stuff like weird USB serial chips requiring driver hackery etc. And I've definitely been in the situation where you tell someone it requires some part that costs "several hundreds of dollars" and they're like "oh no problem that's not an issue at all", because they were looking at the magnitude and not penny pinching. I suppose that would be the market for this kind of thing. There's the other thing that you mention, where if you're using Arduino for this purpose, you might not be experienced enough to trust yourself to choose the right clone. Arduino provides sane defaults and generally the installations I've seen in the wild tended to use fairly close to "defaults".