I was talking to a friend about this the other day.
Back when I were a mere lad, one could buy chips and build boards with CPUs that were every bit as good as what any company could sell you. I interned at HP working with engineers on boards, and I saw both sides, the company and the garage/basement. There was not a lot of difference. I built boards with many different microprocessors, and even designed DRAM controllers. It was doable.
I got a chance to watch the very talented engineers in the chromebook part of Google for two years.After a few months watching them fix problems that were very subtle, I found myself realizing that the era of the Apple ][ was gone for good. I just don't see how "we can build our own mainboards" model gets you to high quality, fast, low power boards. I'd love to be shown wrong. But this "we should start a company" thing that has been appearing in this list for 15 years is now less practical than it was in 2000.
Sorry, I don't like it either.
If you really want a high quality, blob-free, open platform, you're probably best off with ARM, and a good choice is the new Acer 13: coreboot, no blobs, and it's really fine hardware at least for me.
ron