I'm a System76 customer (bought a second laptop 1 year ago, works ok but with issues). I think you exaggerating your current work with the upstream manufactures a little bit, otherwise you wouldn't have completely unsupported things like fingerprint reader in your laptops.
Sometimes we have to make hard decisions like that where the upstream manufacturer insists on a feature in order to get a certain class of design (because then they can resell it to Windows companies and have it be an extra selling point). That sort of thing is happening less and less, though, as we continue to do well and help design successful products.
