GoGerriko

https://github.com/sgjava/userspaceio already does this, but using the latest userspace libraries. I took a peek at mraa and the gpio source uses sysfs which is deprecated. See https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/11/26/sysfs-is-dead-long-live-libgpiod-libgpiod-for-linux-circuitpython/ No need to bake this into Armbian in my opinion. Also, I can install Userspace IO on other Linux distributions besides Armbian, so I'm not limited to a distribution.
 
This whole idea of mapping pins the same seems kind of silly to me since a lot of my SBCs have a variable number of GPIO pins, some have multiple I2C, some have multi purpose pins, etc. This is something that should be done a layer above the actual APIs and is trivial to implement (using a pin map or table).
 
There's no wheel reinvention going on here. I started Userspace IO over 2 years ago and it still remains the only true cross SBC API (there is no need to detect board type). Basically if your kernel is > 4.8 and supports devices mapped to userspace then it should work. mraa has limited ARM support (Pi is the only ARM SBC supported that I have out of 10 different SBCs).
 
As far as non-root access see https://github.com/sgjava/userspaceio#non-root-access
 
I'd love to just install Linux and have everything working, but that's not reality now. I'm not dissing mraa, but it's not something I'd use personally.