[geezerjay]

> I don't understand why they go through so much effort to churn out these boards that are made useless by lack of upstreaming.

I don't believe that this sort of business venture requires that much effort. It appears that in essence they only repackage a currently available soc, and hope that the market bites.

The main reason why these small boards come with a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM is that currently that's precisely the standard for low to mid-end smartphones running Android.

Of course, the people behind the Raspberry Pi foundation do a bit more than repackaging a bare-bones SoC. Hence, they do manage to sell quality products that actually work.