My understanding why The Youtube community loves it is it's featureset and no know is checking the engineering quality through measurements to see how it compares to competing and lower priced products. It is really nice all in one package for a hifi audio streaming endpoint with BlueOS. It ticks all the digital audio endpoint boxes (bitperfect audio, Roon support, MQA, Tidal, Qobuz, DLNA, Spotify etc). and BlueOS is pretty much the best music streaming client out there for retail consumer products, in that it supports all of the major streaming services at their highest level of fidelity and generally works well with a decent UI.
I also suspect the hifi youtubers mostly don't consider the Raspberry Pi solutions competition (except John Darko) so it's cheaper than everything else out there that does the same thing.
Why I am upset about it, which may or may not be why the community is upset, is that I do consider Raspberry Pi solutions and a Topping DAC as competition and frankly the minimum bar. The Node is the right recipe for the solution we all want for a streaming enpoint but they haven't focused on improving the engineering to meet our hifi engineering standards and exceed the minimum bar and it's 4x more expensive than my minimum bar. And we all know they could improve the engineering if they focused on it as companies like Topping release DACs that exceed engineering standards consistently.
Me personally, I now know what's reasonably possible at lower price points and am not willing to accept less at a higher price point.
