I suspect you are describing a large part of consumer behavior. Someone gets a sporty-car, then starts working on the engine, the suspension, the exhaust, gets

I suspect you are describing a large part of consumer behavior. Someone gets a sporty-car, then starts working on the engine, the suspension, the exhaust, gets new rims and tire, new seats... and in the end they could have bought a porsche Thing is, it all depends on your use case. For the pi, it is lots better for hardware projects than a nuc style machine, via the gpios/csi/dsi. and specialized hats. There is also a huge community of forums/documentation/people to help you do new things, solve problems, get unstuck. But if you are doing linux PC kinds of things, like a nas or a media server, you need to do the math.