[easp]

The RPi is tied to the 12-24 month product cycles of consumer electronics devices.

That's great in that it means relatively frequent upgrades. Though at this point, the RPi3 is a very unbalanced system. Particlarly, as others have noted, with regards to network I/O.

Router platforms are tied to the lifecycles of networking standards. The underlying standards change much more slowly, roughly ~5-10 years for major changes. The router SoCs and WiFi chips change somewhat more quickly, but not as quickly as consumer electronics SoCs.

This slow rate of change is probably a good thing for OpenWRT/LEDE, because it means that there is more time for software support to mature for each hardware generation.