edit: flippant jokes aside, they suck. They are the opposite of tough. I have a dead one, it was easy to kill, and I heard the same story from many others who got all hot and bothered by the specs.
What sort of abuse has it withstood? I vaguely recall a blog I was reading at the time had a bin full of dead ones. Maybe we both were incompetent, but you certainly don't hear much about em these days, do you?
It has unprotected 3V inputs. Naked, it shouldn't be subjected to any (electrical) abuse. It's a SoM and a few other devices, not a PLC. That said, I'm not particularly kind to silicon and I have overvolted the pins pretty frequently since I keep forgetting that they're not spec'd for 5V.
The reason you don't hear much about them in the consumer space is that Raspberry Pi's are far more popular there. However, for commercial/industrial uses, SoM's are used everywhere.
Fair enough, but ubiquity of a single device creates a froth of creative energy that generally does not originate from purely industrial spaces, which is why so many devices have coalesced around the pi.
I imagine that from an objective standpoint, the pi is actually not any more inherently robust than a beaglebone, except for the critical mass of users doing development of its os, synergizing with the hardware devices that also appear. Beta was the "right" choice from a technical standpoint, but then I spent years not being able to watch anything that was on VHS, which was everything of course.
I completely agree that it's the ecosystem that gives the Pi its value. No argument from me there. I've shipped Pi's on commercial projects and recommended them for others (and been outvoted: old habits die hard!). I just don't want anyone thinking that they're any better, electrically, than the many other options out there.
edit: flippant jokes aside, they suck. They are the opposite of tough. I have a dead one, it was easy to kill, and I heard the same story from many others who got all hot and bothered by the specs.