available. The Raspberry Pi Zero I was using where it chugged the worst only had 512MB of RAM and a 1GHz CPU. What's interesting though, is this site runs off of similar hardware and has no problem serving up 1000+ pages/day. (Probably somewhere around +/-7000 requests/day if my Heroku metrics can be trusted. That includes all sorts of bad requests and bogus URls though) So who knows.. maybe it was the lib I was using. I guess the counter argument there is, anything will be 'quick enough' if you throw enough resources at it. haha
For a mid-level language, it's not too bad. Here's a quick comparison I found of all languages. I don't see COBOL there, but I'd assume it would be close to FORTRAN.
GPIO not being compatible on the Orange Pi sounds like a mistake to me as well. There's so many modules you can just buy on AdaFruit and stuff that just pop on that wouldn't work with out. Seems like an odd design choice.
Is it just the Orange Pis that lose their Wifi on that router? We had a flakey router that would drop wifi and have to be restarted every few day but in that case, it would drop most or randomly connected devices instead of just the same ones each time.