Our team, from the first day of Sooloos, has never skimped on hardware performance. We strongly feel that good UX requires modern hardware. In ~5 years, whatever you buy for Roon today will be woefully sad. It’s the only way we can accomplish what we do.
It seems all your conflict comes from the fact that you don’t want to change your hardware, and we have suggestions/requirements that your hardware doesn’t meet.
Long term, it makes sense to move the Core into the “cloud”, eliminating it from your home, but that will require even better remotes, and a lot of development time.