I think you are confusing "making another fedora fork for a laptop brand" with "porting a booloader to the device" or "writing a driver for the screen". Simply put you would not be able to use the hardware without the software. Outsourcing it to the community makes the hardware cheaper but the sideeffect is that the software will be crappy even after years of development. For some reason people aren't very keen on writing the low level stuff.

If you compare the Espruino smart watch to the Pine64 smartwatch, it's a night and day difference. My guess is that it's because Espruino handles the low level stuff and let community do the fun stuff, while Pine64 leaves everything on the community. Imo you need a fulltime developer who actually spends time looking in the datasheet and figuring out, how to properly put the PineTime to sleep, not just people who peek into the docs every Saturday.