My instinctive reaction is “this community is very volatile and puts very little value on coordination and communication ... I should be looking for a different SoC family to work with.”
Firstly Aaron, don't let unproductive trolls drag you into a decision making process. Over the years, I have learned you can choose to ignore their comments. Absolutely nothing they can do about it :) :) Eventually they go away and do some work and come back with more productive comments.
For every quality post by a person such as yourself, you will find up to 200 troll posts and rants snipping at you. It is not economic to respond to these trolls and rants. Its just a fact of life, trolls exist, just ignore them, all of us do, there is *nothing* they can say or do which will dent your reputation here :)
2nd, we all here because we all looked hard and find Allwinner chip price and level of cooperation as a complete package, optimal.
If switching to alternative SoC, cooperation may be higher but SoC price higher, or price may be lower but cooperation with open source world low. Either way, open source products made with alternative SoCs liable to become irrelevant to market.
This an opportunity for one of us to get rich, spend $1m buy ARM license, and found RealWinner Corporation (TM) which will be first company to make ARM chip with *SINGLE* header file that describes *ALL* hardware registers and *ALL* bit fields.
So when RealWinner Corporation (TM) make the second chip, it takes mere hours and days with new header file to port all previous work to it.
Sounds simple plan, and it really is that simple.
I do it all day with PIC chips. Sadly Microchip don't make big SoCs to run Linux properly yet.
If they or ReallWinner Corporation (TM) made this first true ARM SoC with single header file, they will *COMPLETELY* sweep aside *ALL* other chip vendors as the open source hoards descend on this chip and port absolutely everything to this new chip with the single header file.