[AbRASiON]

The problem isn't the flash memory. Heck a NUC with a rotational HD will still feel faster on a large library than an Android box.

The problem is the Kodi GUI (like like a lot of GUIs, Android is the same way) depends on single core performance for the best experience. ARM (outside of Nvidia and Apple) nowadays is about throwing a lot of cores at the problem, rather than two powerful cores. NVidia's stuff unfortunately isn't showing up in boxes, and Appletv's are no longer a good solution. Most of the stuff we get is standard ARM, which quite frankly is poor compared to the best ARM chips. The reason Samsung isn't using Qualcomm it its Galaxy S6 is because Qualcomm used generic ARM chips this generation (aka like we find in all these highend sticks/boxes) and Samsung found that to be unacceptable.

The good news is that we are getting there. My iPad Air 2 with the A8X can decode my worst non Hi10 x264 file on the CPU. In a year or so that level of CPU power will be in cheap ARM boxes, along with a GPU that can decode HEVC at a high level. If Android TV gets Google to fix the problems we have with Android as a HTPC OS (namely 24p support and HD audio support) then maybe by then we will have something that finally puts to rest the need for an Intel box.

Between now and that day a lot of people will buy dead end Androidboxes in this hobby and that will be sad, hence my thread to try to steer people to the right (Chrome)box.

On the Apple TV2 the problem was without question the flash performance. The program would change page and 12 more movie thumbnails had to load and god damn was it slow compared to a decent intel machine with an SSD.
Perhaps this could be alleviated by XBMC having a pre-fetch for the next page coded in (like ACDSee and XnView pre-loading the next image in rotation)
Regardless, changing page in the movie library was atrocious and I've never used a machine which wasn't a PC which did it acceptably.