The devices they make that don't ship with Linux on them are pretty good, those are also easier to get fully functional software since the scope is so much smaller.
Do you think RISC-V will make any difference for the Pine64 situation (especially the SPI flash)? I remember seeing something about a UEFI standard. Would that help?
The currently shipping affordable RISC-V SBCs tend to be RISC-V cores embedded with a bunch of frustrating undocumented peripherals, more or less the same as with affordable ARM SBCs. It's disappointing :(
The whole linux side is just a bit of a mess