[gozo]

While I like affordable things and development boards in particular, hardware price isn't that much of an issue anymore. Most people, especially programmers, are going to spend more in terms of labour cost even just getting this up and running. Actually doing something exciting takes from a fair to a huge amount of time, which you most likely won't be able to recuperate. At least not directly. Until someone has a next level value proposition that enables more things, I would suggest sticking to the boards you're already not using.