As marktangotango mentioned - the deal is roughly the same for all arm boards. Usually there is a lot of tinkering required, and boot process is convoluted and not standartized at all; and it is usually always up to the community to develop/adopt lots of that things.
Raspberry Pi feels more "polished" precisely because of that too - the active community means active project. And even then it is not free of hardware-backed errors and failing points.
Charging ICs are finicky things on its own - the risk of frying the board/device is always there.
So "landmines" are actually always present - get any random board like Radxa and try deviating even a little bit from "stock" GNU/Linux distribution and its outdated kernel, horrendous patches and binary blobs - and you'll get barely working hardware too.
In my experience the best outcome usually comes from developers being as open as possible; meticulously documenting and publishing everything related to the product, circuits and all.
p.s. Sheer manpower needed to fully QC and maintain at least PC-grade quality of circuitry of that level has to be comparable with said PC vendors employments, hundreds of people if not more. Pine64 and similar vendors operation is small, especially in comparison; they don't move product in that amounts.
p.p.s. being unable to boot from emmc on rk3399 device is new to me to be honest, if you drop by #pine64 irc channel on their server me and local folks can most certainly try to help with that.
> Meritocracy (merit, from Latin mereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos 'strength, power') is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class.
I fail to see what does your education has to do with anything in that regard. Meritocracy is precisely the opposite - you earn your place under the sun with your skills and abilities. If you don't have them - learn them. If you don't want to - then yes, you're failure.