ALi was indeed pretty much on the avoid list for me for most of their history. It was only when they came out with the ULi M1695 made famous by the Asrock939dual-sata2 that they were a contender for best out of nowhere. One of the coolest boards I ever owned and was rock solid for me even with all of the weird configs I ran on it. I kind of wish I hadn't sold it even today!

I remember a lot disappointed people on forums who couldn't upgrade their cheap PCs as well, but there were still motherboards available with AGP to slot into for Intel's best products. Intel couldn't just remove it from the landscape altogether (assuming they wanted to) because they weren't the only company making Intel supporting chipsets. IIRC Intel/AMD/Nvidia were not interested in making AGP+PCIe supporting chipsets at all, but VIA/ALi and maybe SiS made them instead because it was a free for all space still. Once that went away Nvidia couldn't control their own destiny.