I completely agree with your points, but please note that the community in another thread (as already pointed out here as well) has arrived at a very clean solution for oculink 4i which works perfectly. I am currently 3D printing different versions of it and it works fine. People there are also working on getting oculink 8i to work. So we have it (and to some extent I personally believe this was expected by Framework of course). The wait here is over already for some time. I am still expecting @Josh_Cook to get back at some point and would actually buy it as I ordered it, but there is a solution already.
PS: and yes, until this solution occurred, I was indeed eyeballing the notebooks you mentioned (which now are nothing special anymore, as FW16 has oculink 4i). And needless to say, I completely agree with the point that it is surprising to say the least that there is no official solution for this. And no, I think noone is “proud” of the solution we have, but it does work. 