I think the 16" should have been developed in conjunction with “the community” - or at least customers of the 13". Their downfall seems to have been the desire to be be Apple, and present it as “one more thing” after the 13" motherboards IIRC. Producing such a complex product fully formed - stacked with groundbreaking features - is one thing if you are the biggest computer business in the world with thousands of minions sweating every detail, harder for a smaller startup.
As it stands, many of us probably have our own head-scratchers where we wonder why they did something one way, or more frustratingly, why they did not take a particular concept to its obvious conclusion. My bugaboo is the latter: the input deck is not given sufficient headroom to accommodate discrete keyboard switches. This has kneecapped those who might otherwise handbuild staggered column and other novel keyboard formats, and would have taken advantage of the swappable input deck and programmable firmware to offer more than the sum of these could individually.
I’m sure many of our niggles could have been addressed with a more collaborative design process where the concept was released for purposes of getting opinions, before the design was cast. In my previous example, Framework is now squeezed between scrappy upstarts like Reform, and corporate giants like Dell’s Alienware brand, both of which do boast mechanical keyboards, with a chassis that only accommodates membrane units.