Fair points but with all due respect completely misses the point and context. My comment was a reply to a new user interested in esphome on a post about esphome

Fair points but with all due respect completely misses the point and context. My comment was a reply to a new user interested in esphome on a post about esphome. You're talking about CircuitPython, 35KB web replies, PSRAM, UF2 bootloader, etc. These are comparatively very advanced topics and you didn't mention esphome once. The comfort and familiarity of Amazon for what is already a new, intimidating, and challenging subject is of immeasurable value for a novice. They can click those links, fill a cart, and have stuff show up tomorrow with all of the usual ease, friendliness, and reliability of Amazon. If they get frustrated or it doesn't work out they can shove it in the box and get a full refund Amazon-style. You're suggesting wandering all over the internet, ordering stuff from China (or Amazon for roughly 3x the cost of what I suggested), multiple vendors, etc while describing a bunch of things that frankly just won't matter to them. I say this as someone who has been an esphome and home assistant user since day one. The approach I described has never failed or remotely bothered me and over the past ~decade I've seen it suggested to new users successfully time and time again. In terms of PSRAM to my knowledge the only thing it is utilized for in the esphome ecosystem is higher resolution displays and more advanced voice assistant scenarios that almost always require -S3 anyway and are a very advanced, challenging use cases. I'm very familiar with displays, voice, the S3, and PSRAM but more on that in a second... > live with one less LX7 core and no Bluetooth I'm the founder of Willow[0] and when comparing Willow to esphome the most frequent request we get is supporting bluetooth functionality i.e. esphome bluetooth proxy[1]. This is an extremely popular use case in the esphome/home assistant community. Not having bluetooth while losing a core and paying more is a bigger issue than pin spacing. It's also a pretty obscure board and while not a big deal to you and I if you look around at docs, guides, etc, etc you'll see the cheap-o boards from Amazon are by far the most popular and common (unsurprisingly). Another plus for a new user. Speaking of Willow (and back to PSRAM again) even the voice assistant satellite functionality of Home Assistant doesn't fundamentally require it - the most popular device doesn't have it either[2]. Very valuable comment with a lot of interesting information, just doesn't apply to context. [0] - https://heywillow.io/ https://heywillow.io/ [1] - https://esphome.io/components/bluetooth_proxy.html https://esphome.io/components/bluetooth_proxy.html [2] - https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voice-remote/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voi...