I agree though I'd mention that the community behind the BeagleBone Black, while not nearly as large as the Raspberry Pi community, has managed to reach a criti

I agree though I'd mention that the community behind the BeagleBone Black, while not nearly as large as the Raspberry Pi community, has managed to reach a critical enough mass to mostly avoid the problems you're talking about. The killer on the BeagleBone Black for me for some uses is the rather terrible maximum resolution for HDMI display output. (For other uses the two dedicated microcontrollers make it a great device). Even the Raspberry Pi has it beat on display resolution, though in an increasingly high-density display world this is a problem that most of these systems suffer from (other than a couple of very high-end developer boards with [somewhat iffily-supported] displayports). For people who really want something with more oomph than the Pi or the BBB, I'd suggest something built on the imx6 like the Wandboard. Yes, the community is much smaller, but IME it is much easier to "go it alone" or with a small community when you have the sort of documentation that Freescale provides when compared to the usual-suspects of Chinese chipsets like the Rockchip or Allwinner SoCs.