> Buy a $300 motherboard now in case you need future features, or buy a $100 motherboard now that does everything you currently need and then buy a second or even third $100 motherboard if you ever actually need those future improvements.

Right, but the problem is that by now your $100 new motherboard requires a new CPU and new RAM. Which is very much not $100.

In the past we got away with PCI cards to add features without changing the motherboard, but we still ended up changing everything every 2 years anyway…