TBH, on the Chinese el-cheapos, dont expect a lot of firmware upgrades etc. They do happen, but not often. The T95Z did have a couple of bugs, and they did do a FW upgrade to fix it, but I had to search the forums to find it.
Most of the el-cheapos are 2gb ram and 16gb storage, I have one thats 3gb/32gb and I highly recommend the extra memory.
If support is important then you pay more for that, get something US backed. I have 3 of the Chinese ones, and in my head I just figured them as disposable when I bought them. However all three are still running well. If one dies, I will just chunk it and buy another. I recommend the disposable ones for folks that are tech savvy, which I gather from your posts that you are.
If you setting it up for pops-in-law, then I would strip the pre-loaded Kodi, and the waaaaay too many factory installed addons. Reinstall kodi, and just the addons he will actually use. That will save the constant auto-updates of useless addons that occurs with factory loaded kodi. Nothing worse than turning on your box and waiting through 5 minutes worth of auto-updates before you can do anything.
