OE has been around a while, and while it has matured well it is still somewhat of a bridge to building bespoke distributions. It's a great start if you're looking to maintain a custom distribution for a custom product/form factor but it's a bit rough for end users. Worse still, there is little-to-no motivation for vendors to open up their products to their customers.
I've always thought that one of the best things about the Raspberry Pi/ODROID/Zero/Arduino/other mini computers/microcontrollers is that they made it obvious and easy (easier at least) for people to bring hardware to consumers, at the sacrifice of some speed and efficiency.
When the Raspberry Pi came out and only cost $25, it made me think I could write some relatively resilient/robust software, put it on a SD card, put it in a PI, add a case, and sell useful hardware for $50. OE seems like a good step in the direction of recovering some of the speed/efficiency losses that running even some of the most lightweight linux distros would force you into.
I think the end user problem can be solved with extremely robust client-side installers and amazing instructions. If IKEA can get people to build furniture (even if badly), why can't we manage to get a user who has booted an operating system on a running computer to flash a device, when usually most cases are the default case (as in you usually don't have to change a ton of ADB/system settings to connect to most android devices).
