How simple can an audio computer be?

I have USB-C OTG adapters for Bitzie and Majestic. I have so much great stuff at my disposal but very limited space to keep it set up. In a way, money rich but space poor. I have over half a dozen PCs from Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF to Up Xtreme i11 0000 version to UP Squared V2 to UM690 to an older NUC too. Need to sell some PCs over the coming weeks to clear some space. Going to settle on AMD Ryzen over Intel I think, especially once I can get a cellular module working via an M.2 adapter. I have gone on quite a tangent due to my interest in computer hardware. I will probably stick with PCIe over GPIO for the digital transport as PCIe hardware is more universally available on almost all computer platforms.

This is an example. All the subsequent UP boards have the same pinout as the original UP board, which uses the same layout as the Raspberry Pi. I guess I won't be going down this route without becoming a fully-fledged "software developer" and writing pages of code? I would be able to use Windows 10 Pro or a Linux distro. With a computer like this, you could directly compare GPIO and PCIe signal paths as the hardware for both is accessible.