Very good, thanks for the quick reply. I've heard a couple comments that the RasPi is not suitable for this sort of thing, but hearing that it's used in the Desk product (a professional, commercial product) is reassuring.
I guess what you refer to is the known problem of the RasPi wearing out the SD-card if you run it over standard Linux system over long time - which I personally did not notice working ~3 months mostly compiling with continuous write access to the card.
To be on the safe side, the FW provided with the Desk is mostly read-only, i.e. it writes to the SD-card only on re-configuration, while everything else goes into memory mapped filesystems.
With current SD-card prices this would not be an issue, if reasonable user, clones SD-cards prior of using them, and swaps them if they fail...on the other hand I would rather choose Arduino over Pi, but...that's me...now it's all - whatever works first...
...and when talking about sharing mutual knowledge and learning from it...
maybe something usefull comes from Scrypt-ASIC teams...and their open-source PCB's :
https://github.com/losh11/aura-asic