Reflecting about all this, I find the rpi design curious. Most of the SoC is wasted and impose heavy side effects (lan over capricious usb). The graphical applications (video processing, etc) seems to be limited by what is already in the GPU blob.

Honest question, isn't there more simple SoC (armv6 + basic 2d gpu) with sane default and i/o chipsets ?

How much of the closed source binary is due to the GPU ?

With a simpler and open source system, I think it would have provided a better learning substrate than what it is now.