I want to open a dialog with EVGA (and other Motherboard manufacturers and designers) about our needs. I recently re-entered the game after several years working on my health, and am finally able to take on a new build. EVGA has been good to me. Scratch that. EVGA has been great to me. Jacob in particular went out of his way multiple times to get me parts I needed to make my system work and the pricing I needed to achieve my goals. Though the state of the industry is a bit screwed up. I can't blame EVGA, I blame Intel. I'm looking at my needs and the individual technologies out there and wanted to discuss putting them on motherboards. These are things that have been around for some time, but are still rare to see (for many reasons, but no good ones). Please, help the discussion and add to the list of features.

I'm looking to build workstations and gaming rigs. Gaming rigs are easy, the features available are great, the benchmarks available from many sources allow for informed decisions in part picking. We can design game machines with one arm tied behind our backs. It is the workstation board where we are being failed. First, let's talk form factor and NVMe drive. I love these new drives, the speed and price (while it is still pricey, it is brutal), but they've lead to a complacency in board design. I understand that sticking them between PCIe slots is convenient, but using those slots cuts off convenient access to them, and the heat issue is handled in the obvious way (sticking a shield on it), which I can appreciate the opportunity for aesthetic design, but it's not really ideal, and makes the form factor of the board go up. This roomy design is unnecessary. I'd rather not use EATX boards. I would prefer smaller boards (ATX and MATX motherboards for workstations, and smaller boards for gaming); I'm saying to have board designers challenge themselves, Get all the dimm slots the processors can handle on the boards, and don't worry about SSDs. I'd rather use a PCIe add-on board to plug in a bunch of NVMe drives (4+ drive ideally; for full raid options). And given the utility of PCIe slot extensions, I don't see a need for the spacing, but having ATX options that do use the double and triple spacing is cool. Sadly, I don't see an end to the need for SATA ports. As back up storage goes, HDDs are more amazing today than ever. I was really looking to build a full featured system with Thunderbolt 3 headers for front I/O, but for years now the Thunderbolt 3 headers haven't made their way onto boards (in mass), probably due to certifications. That's a poor excuse though. But my biggest problem, and it is a deal breaker, is the lack of ECC memory support on Intel desktop chips. I understand there may be hope of ECC returning to the core series in Q1 2019 on LGA 3647 i9s, but I have little faith in Intel at the moment. They have been disappointingly unethical in recent times, and don't seem to understand their customers needs. Without ECC, we can't do business.
 
The incoming technologies of PCIe 5.0, DDR5, and Wifi6 (802.11ax) are really exciting to me, but the news about PCIe 4.0 on enterprise hardware has me cringing. I thought we all agreed to skip 4.0. Please, let's not do 4.0 and just focus on 5.0.

I'll probably add to this, but would love to hear from the rest of you.