I have 1GB of ram on my A1 (2 back of 512MB) and i have no problems at all. Maybe the problem could be the type of RAM you are using... Not all ram bank are accepted well from UBoot..
All of us has some guilty in the last years. First of all the war between MOS and AOS user's side. From the software side we should understand tha if we want to put extrnal users to our platform we must use the Open Source. Is the only solution. I'm saying this thing since a lot of time..
On the hw side well.. the story is well known.. But i assure you that if also our "heroes" sometimes will use a little good sense we could have hw also TODAY...