[dave78]

They weren't discouraged because it was an almost entirely unique product in the market at the time. It was Raspberry Pi or nothing. Demand for such a product was obviously huge (even bigger than RPi anticipated), so with no other options in the market, all the weight was put behind RPi by default. Something new today would need to siphon away a bunch of the RPi community to get the same momentum, and that seems unlikely because for the most part RPi treats the community pretty well. Aside from the shortages and allocation strategies, they do a great job of having polished solutions with software that works well and keeps getting updated.