[swinglock]

I must say it's silly we can't be trusted with a simple way to drop in a shell script on the SD card that runs at boot as root in rasbian.

I don't even understand the idea that it could be bad for newbies to maybe mess up. The whole point of the RPi was to give students a small, cheap, easy to repair computer with low-level features to learn with.

[sneak]

Yeah, the project is sort of a mess maintainer-wise, but at least it is straightforward to modify/rebuild.