Re: This is good.
I, to provide the other side, am happy that the power decision was 5V over USB. This allows me to power it from batteries designed for phone use, which you can buy for quite cheaply and which are easy for nontechnical people to use. I can therefore carry all the pieces needed to run the pi in a small container, rather than having to solder a battery power system together. I'll grant that, in a situation where space is very constrained, a smaller 3.3V battery would be preferable, but I don't think that is very frequent. The main reason is that the raspberry pi, as great as it is on most fronts, simply does not run very long on a battery. Even the zero will run for only a day or two on a large battery*. For devices to be placed in a situation without any power, usually much more time will be needed. The small batteries that are easily shoved into a small space will not provide enough lifetime for an independent** system.
*Large in the sense of a USB battery for phone usage. There are some really big ones that will run a pi zero for a week or more.
**There would be advantages for some projects in having a pi run on battery for a period measured in months. Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
