I realize this is a little old, but would the Armbian group like a Orange Pi i96 for development? I have an extra, and since the manufacturer-provided Debian distribution leaves a bit to be desired, it's not doing anything. I'd be more than happy to ship it off to whomever for development. It's new-in-box.
The provided distros work well enough, assuming you tell it all network parameters (MAC address, DNS server(s), etc.) and don't want any kind of network file-sharing capability - they didn't build any NFS or CIFS capability into the kernel. That's where I am now, trying to re-compile kernel from provided sources but this is completely new to me.