[blacksmith_tb]

The care-and-feeding argument is absolutely legit, I have made several things over the years with RPi-s that were great until they weren't. Like an air quality monitor / logger which ran fine for a couple of years, until the sensor conked out, I replaced it with a turnkey one that's worked fine - though I am sure its sensor will also give up eventually, that's just the nature of them). Or a chiming clock that drove a servo to strike a doorbell chime, the little cheap hobby servos burned out after a couple years, bigger ones introduced more complicated power setups, and bashed the chime harder than was needed. But I also have a couple of Zero W-s which have been running fine for quite a while, the key for them, aside from simpler hardware, was the 'overlay file system' which loads into RAM only, so the sd cards don't get trashed writing logfiles etc.