When I started using SBC's for my home setup, I skipped rPi's. At the time, being ARM based was a bit limiting (IIRC, at the time some stuff still hadn't been ported to ARM). So I went with odroid h2/h3 [0]. X86 based, lots of memory to work with, and much cheaper then a nuc - and uses much less power then my old Dell/HP blade servers from EBay :-)

0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3