it all depends on what your plan is what the device should do; I have a R6C for about 18 months now and bought it as an alternative/better more integrated alternative for existing RPi4 (and also RPi5 that still has no M.2 socket). I see many people on for example RPi forum who want to create some router thing, so they buy HATs and USB stuff for an RPi, but this NanoPi series has even WRT preinstalled. I removed it as I wanted generic server box (virtual machines host mainly). I do not really need the 2x RJ45 currenlty, but the metal case is great. Is simple passive cooling and insect/animal proof. It is mainly bootloader and kernel (and DTB/overlays) that matter. The userspace can be taken from elsewhere if you know how to. I currently use the R6C as desktop as well in another cooler room (summer hot here). EDK2-UEFI v1.1 bootloader, Armbian edge 6.16-rc3 kernel, Opensuse Tumbleweed for Btrfs rootfs to drive a DVI monitor KDE plasma 6.4.x. It means various Rockchips HW blocks do not work like NPU and video codecs HW accel block, but that is a choice. If you need those, use vendor kernel and see what exctly you need/want. The 2x RJ45 might be a chalenge, see maybe also:
I found the reason for the crash: the 6.1.84-vendor-rk35xx doesn't work together with the 2024.10 mainline U-boot.
Earlier the SPI-flash was empty and the Rock3a booted from SD-card, a U-boot version from 2017 (Armbian_24.11.1_Rock-3a_noble_current_6.6.62-kisak.img.xz). I put that image in 'beta' mode so I got the 6.1.84-vendor-rk35xx (+ rock-3a-sata.dtbo). That all still worked.
I then put the 2024.10 mainline U-boot in SPI and wiped the sector range 34-32767 from the SD-card. Then I discovered that the 6.1.84-vendor-rk35xx always crashed, independent of SATA modules etc.
I now disabled the SPI and took sector range 34-32767 from the official Radxa image (rock-3a_debian_bullseye_cli_b25.img.xz) and put that on the SD-card with the Armbian Noble (latest beta channel trunk.201) and rebooted. That does not crash and works same as with 6.12.6-edge-rockchip64 that I used before the reboot to write the sector range 34-32767.
Version is: latest-2023.07.02-3-b1eb2bde-gb1eb2bde (Aug 29 2023 - 10:43:04 +0000)
So I guess I need to look at differences in uboot configs and likely also uboot sources.
The other thing is that If I want to be able to boot from a single SATA device with the Rockchip on-chip SATA, the uboot In the SPI-needs to default to SATA for M.2 E-key connector and not the default PCIe-2x1.
Or wait till I got an extra NVME to put in the M.2 M-key connector and load rock-3a-sata.dtbo after uboot together with kernel. That is preferred I think looking at possible future use-cases.