Hopefully stock comes back soon. Afaik, May is when they’re expecting stock.
It feels as though the OS is in a similar state of development as the Gameshell; just that it uses the Emulationstation interface that “looks” more modern. I haven’t looked much into the forums, but is there more internal developments with the in-house dev team?
If a nightmare setup is what you want to avoid, I’d say that you’d get the same kind of setup with the Odroid, and working out the syntax of the emulationstation config. It’s not hard, but it’s another learning curve.
Emulationstation wise, If it means that it would bring people to feel as though the gameshell is more complete, I may very well include it in future as well. It’s just so finicky, slow and manual to add cores and references etc. Then again, it’s pretty much the same as an action.config file.
(edit: I did some work on Emulation Station today: Custom D.E.O.T. V2.0+/Clockwork OS v0.5 image - With customised DEOT interface, Kernel 5.4.24, Optional 1400MHz OC, Debian 10 Buster, Retroarch 1.8.5, Mupen64+ plus more! (Current build: 200411))
The fact that it’s 1.3GHz was partially the reason I figured the option to clock it to 1.4GHz would bring the gameshell up to par. I suppose, having clock speed changing, and kernel updates/drivers to bring better functionality to existing components is similar enough to a mainboard upgrade.
And ha, I’m just playing devil’s advocate right now. Just thought I’d provide information to support both sides. I actually do tinker a lot with a lot of other consoles, and devices and have no allegiances one way or another to any.