yeah I was really excited about the first generation of RPi and then ran headlong into big problems where the kernel would drop USB packets when running at sustained high loads at USB 2.0 speeds. And nobody else could fix it because it was relying on CPU documentation that Broadcom hadn't released yet. It took basically 2 years to get USB working properly, and the RPi architecture basically uses USB as a system bus so potentially more or less everything was affected...
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19
A huge number of the use-cases that people were excited about ended up being "low-power device to connect X usb device to network" (whether that's storage devices, cameras, whatever) and it kinda killed a lot of the utility for a long time.
And yeah I know the "official" purpose was as a low-power system for schools, but the first gen also had reliability problems due to the full-size SD cards being unsupported in their slow and tending to warp a little bit with sustained warm-ish temperatures and questionable power adapters people were using, so they weren't even something I'd really want to administer, the reliability wasn't there.
I know a lot of these have been fixed over time in various fashions (the microSD card doesn't cantilever out into open air, so it doesn't tend to warp as much, and people have figured out better adapters, etc) but the early experience was rough and the software issues were exacerbated by Broadcom's high level of secrecy with their documentation. And unlike Asahi, there wasn't the drive to "figure it out" and write your own implementation/documentation - just as an outsider it seems like the existence of documentation (even if nobody outside the foundation could see it) killed the drive to reverse-engineer it. Why go to the effort ifthe documentation exists, type thing.
