That tradeoff will always be there. Be it stability, hardware compatibility, picture quality or something else. Comparing 40-60 dollar 'toys' like the Raspberry Pi or Odroid boards to an Nvidia Shield or fullblown PC's will also have their prices as additional factor.
I'm curious which part of the picture quality could be a problem for you, compared to the Dune & Popcorn hour. Nvidia graphics have had the better capabilities for handling video in XBMC/Kodi. I have the Nvidia Shield TV myself, and it recently got another update. One thing it now supports is HDR. Not every device fully supports 10bit video yet. Sometimes 10bit color is decoded down to 8bit. Intel's Apollo Lake GPU has 10bit support, not so sure every Skylake has.
I stlll find x86 devices to have the better stability since they can use proper HDDs/SSDs for storage. SD cards and USB sticks are too vulnerable and slow to me. NAND storage on Odroid or Wetek may be quicker, but I think there is no TRIM-support for that, AFAIK.
As far as remotes go, they are not my field of expertise. I use CEC whenever available, something that a NUC does not offer by default. You'll need an extra USB-CEC adapter for that one.