Yup I do understand; selecting a SoC with open reference specs and mainline kernel development would have been the solution. There are a few ARM SoC's popping up that are mostly mainline complete (bannaboard/rk3xxx series of ARM). Unfortunately it takes until you go to release and then the support/build issues to come barreling in before decision makers start to understand just how much extra TCO selecting a Shiny bells and whistles SoC with NDA actually ends up costing.
I have been using the ar7xx mip's platforms mostly as my build targets, and I can tell you that compared to blob tainted tree's they are a joy to work with. Not mention the security implementations and ability to properly architect and debug end to end architectures is worth it's weight in gold.
It's not that easy to just pick and chose these things, especially not with regards to what we've created with the Almond+. Even the Realtek based chip we started with, wouldn't have been able to support many of the things you're asking for.
We have a very specific ARM SoC that has been designed for network usage and it has enough interfaces to work with what we need it to do. Picking some random ARM processor wouldn't have worked, as routers are not the same as a smartphone and thus the processors are not the same. We require PCI Express lanes, something that many ARM processors don't have enough of. MIPS wasn't an option at the time and still isn't for a 3x3 MIMO 802.11ac configuration and as such, we settled on what we're using after having compared pros and cons of a wide range of other options.
It's easy to stand at the sidelines making comments and as someone that claims to be familiar with this stuff, you should know better than making random comments before we've even had a chance to do anything more than ship the product.
If you think this is it for the Almond+, then you're sorely mistaken and instead of being negative about everything, maybe it would be better if we try to work together on whatever features you want?
We're not a big company so we're a lot more flexible, but please understand that this also means that we have resource limitations in terms of manpower.
We'd be more than happy to work with you if there's something you want to develop for the Almond+, but your approach isn't one that's going to make you any friends, regardless of which company you're talking to.
