Do you think RISC-V will make any difference for the Pine64 situation (especially the SPI flash)? I remember seeing something about a UEFI standard. Would that help?
RISC-V works exactly the same as ARM from the perspective of pine64 and distribution and it will not solve anything
The currently shipping affordable RISC-V SBCs tend to be RISC-V cores embedded with a bunch of frustrating undocumented peripherals, more or less the same as with affordable ARM SBCs. It's disappointing :(
See for instance the Allwinner D1 chip.
There are standards for ARM bootloaders to have UEFI compat. Pine64 just needs to care.