[leone007]

Only for the sake of argument.

Plus you should NOT be relying on the Kodi Leia Netflix Addon to keep working reliably, if at all going forward. I could fall over tomorrow.
The Kodi Leia Amazon Addon for example has now been blocked from streaming video at the video server source. It cannot be fixed. Game over.

You need to use a Netflix App for 100% reliability if that sort of video streaming is a must have now and into the future.

"F..ck 'em" said the customer. "I can always go rogue and download their content to my NAS, and stream it to myself wherever I am."

I don't see how these big companies are trying to fight piracy.

The Mi Box does not have even good deinterlacing anyway. It's half motion, stuttering rubbish. Does not matter how you output the picture to a TV.
All AMLogic Chipset devices running any sort of Android OS need to be avoided for any sort of interlaced TV viewing.

I don't necessarily want deinterlacing in my streaming box, my TV or my projector can easily handle the deinterlacing of 1080i, but only if my streaming box is able to do 1080i resolution output. (LE does this, but can't do HDR, nor Netflix HW encode) EDIT: it is actually a CoreElec device, not LE. I have LE on my NUC. 

The only device that actually has a 4K interface and 4K icons with great output picture quality at 4K is the Apple TV 4K.

The Shield's main screen GUI is coded at 1080p. And it's upscaling is pretty poor by comparison vs more modern Chipset devices.

What are modern Chipset devices?

The Mi Box is definitely NOT what you want either. You are asking to much of a budget Android device.

Good luck in the hunt. Compromises will need to be made.  

IKR  I am willing to pay as much as I have to for the perfect solution, which obviously doesn't exist. I am also willing to make the compromise as long as I find an L1 DRM device that can do 1080i output, which most likely I won't.