Regarding technology, just as Linux initially the key is not having a technological advantage, but being cheaper and good enough. The improvements can come later, when the ecosystem gets bigger and more resources pours in.
There are a lot of costs in implementing an ISA and that includes: design, functional verification, physical implementation and software testing. All those steps together will require hundreds and hundreds of engineers, many expensive tools and thousands of man-hours. And once you are done, you will need to find be careful not to violate any patents while shipping your CPU to the end customer.
By paying a license fee to ARM, you get all these steps done for you plus with support.
Linux is something that you can download from kernel.org, compile overnight and get it booting right away. RISC-V is something that you need to build yourself.
There are of course multiple FPGA implementations (I have one about 2 feet away from me now), but they are very slow.
> > RISC-V is thrown around like if it's an already working CPU but it is not
(Evidence of existing CPUs provided)
> I am aware that they exist but it's not like companies are going to actively invest in devices for the end consumer purely based on RISC-V.
During its early years many scoffed at it as you have RISC-V. "It is a hobby OS. It will never be able to really compete with the likes of Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. Heck, it won't even be able to compete with SCO and Unixware."
You need much more support and verification while developing hardware then developing software. And while you can reuse the functional design (please note the keyword "functional"), the physical implementation needs to be redone from project to project.
ARM, Intel, AMD, Apple and Qualcomm have an army of engineers with all kinds of tools that go through all the steps of hardware design and implementation which you can't do as a side project at home using just your computer.
That combination of features makes it appealing in a variety of business cases - for business reasons.
RISC-V can't be customised at relatively low cost. It's nominally free, but the freeness doesn't mean much in a business setting.
The total cost of developing a custom core remains beyond the reach of small companies.
Big companies already know there's an established ARM ecosystem with working compilers and a simple, risk-free, and relatively affordable business model.
So what business problem does RISC-V solve?
That is complete nonsense. Linux, particularly Red Hat Enterprise Linux is as serious of a server OS as exists in the world today. Companies like IBM and Oracle would never embrace a "hobby" OS in an enterprise setting.
As for "occasional security horrors", sadly there is no OS of any flavor that is immune.
"So what business problem does RISC-V solve?"
For one thing, RISC-V offers the promise of fully open computer systems, without opaque black boxes anywhere providing potential back doors or other problems. The Intel AMT vulnerability is an excellent example of how that can go very wrong:
https://www.ssh.com/vulnerability/intel-amt/
RISC-V also provides a playground for smaller entities (like university labs) wishing to experiment with innovative new hardware techniques like Unums. That's very valuable in its own right.
http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/170201-slides....