everything in norns ecosystem is designed for stereo I/O. the norns hardware has stereo I/O with a headphone amp, and the shield is just a means to get the same functionality with lower cost.
presumably you have some specific creative application in mind for higher channel counts. just work on that application in a hardware-agnostic fashion - supercollider is a great environment for multichannel work. maybe a rasbpi will be able to handle it and maybe not.
if you think about it a little, i think you’ll quickly see how it would be basically impossible to make a platform like norns that seamlessly supports all possible applications of arbitrary I/O channel counts. more general environments like supercollider or csound already exist and are very mature.
the norns system is about having a predictable common environment for sharing. i guess i primarily see it, like all embodied designs, as a set of limitations. limitations are what allows us to actually do work instead of making tools forever.
