The main issue was that they forked UBoot and did not release their modifications, making it hard to run anything other than their Armbian fork. They forked Armbian a long time ago and kind of hacked things together rather than adding support for their HW to Armbian. After a while I gave up running anothing other than their releases, I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 3 and 5. But it's really uncool that they don't release their UBoot build! Lame! Their WiFi chip (Dragon something brand), had a bug where the WiFI beacon frames had incorrect element orderings, causing inconsistent results with some clients. Overall their Wifi was pure garbage. But apart from the Wifi it's robust stuff.

I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 5 (only problem was soft reboot hanging), but only because Joshua Riek had created and maintained an Ubuntu distribution for the Rockchip. That project seems to be in limbo now, no kernel updates since at least a year.