The Raspberry PI foundation has certainly met its goals and the Pi is an outstanding educational device. The philosophy of having everyone contribute through forums and code is a marvelous educational direction. However, I think the Pi Foundation is missing out in a couple of areas.
When a problem is solved, and there are clear cut directions which can be reproduced and are solid, they seem to disappear into the forum, requiring lots of searching. I would like to see the Foundation set up a procedure that when someone has found a valid solution, they can present it to a volunteer board, which will review it, provide quality assurance, and then submit it to a Pi Foundation Wiki...
To me a perfect example of the weakness of the current approach is in the TV and sound arena. YouTube is a most popular feature of the internet ... However, getting YouTube to work on a Pie is a hit or miss activity ... with no clearcut approach that seems to work. One can spend hours and hours and hours searching forum threads, trying different solutions and eventually succeeding or giving up. There has to be a solution out there that is solid ... which could be presented by the Pi people as the way to do it.
Yes, the learning processing of trying dozens of different things certainly does teach one more about Linux...but it is not necessarily teaching it in the best way...
The TV capability of the Pi has been touted by the Pi Foundation ... Yet it is hard to get it to work, and I think, by leaving it in this state, you limit some of the capability of the device.
Neither Rasbian nor RaspXBMC work out of the box ... for example many of the add-ons in RaspXBMC simply do not work ... or if they work, they work without sound ... This could all be alleviated, if the solutions were made available ... and/or if the distributions came with applications which perform these functions.