Enjoyed the back and forth. Conclusion is a good one too. My pet peeve remains that folk are only too happy to buy expensive motherboards with Realtek NICs and non-ECC Ram, etc because in their mind a kick-butt gaming rig is also a good candidate for a NAS - and it likely isn’t.
Too little attention up front on use case, leads to $$ expenditures that really represent a sunk cost more than anything. So many decent X10SDV and like boards out there that make fantastic file servers for very little money yet use ECC, high quality HBAs and NICs for a fraction of the cost of a gaming rig.
Supermicro knows this too - they still make a bunch of x10SDV motherboards precisely because their current motherboards are geared towards NVME, computation, etc. not traditional file servers with HDDs. Yet, there are plenty of folk who are still building file servers who prefer low power consumption and excellent performance for that use case.
Similarly, take the D-15xx series of chips and compare the 17xx or 20xxx series of Xeons and tell me what makes a later chip so much better than the 15xx. That 15xx series hit a sweet spot re: PCIe lanes, power consumption, etc. making it perfect for file servers with some expansion options. Atoms could not compete with them other than in mini-ITX and even there Asrock has shown that more can be done (570 board with ryzen and oculink x2).
At the moment, the crown re file servers is likely going to AMD on account of PCIe lanes that allow either NVME or SATA. Talk about future-proof.