Right. Which is why my Aquantia NIC didn’t work at all under CORE and would pretty consistently fall over under heavy load with SCALE. I’m speaking from experience here, not simply hypothetically. Switching to the Chelsio NIC I’d installed when I was testing the system with CORE completely resolved these issues. See also:
Garbage hardware doesn’t become less garbage just because someone hacked together a driver for it, which is why our hardware recommendations haven’t really changed with the introduction of SCALE. Sure, more stuff will “work,” if by “work” you mean that it’ll be recognized. But when we’re recommending hardware, we’re looking at what’s been proven to work reliably over a significant period of time.
Put differently, the large majority of hardware out there is, to use your phrase, “utter unknown shite.”
“One of the reasons”? Well, probably, but there’s a long list. “iX had obviously abandoned CORE by the time they announced SCALE” is much higher on the list. Higher yet (by a lot) is the perception that we’ll now have an apps/plugins catalog that doesn’t suck. Somewhere around the same place on the list is Docker. Better VM management is up there too.