I can tell you that many of the vendors are reading this thread.
Also, some of the commercial NAS servers are starting to adopt Xeon D.
I've yet to see anything compelling in the Xeon D NAS space, alas. A lot of it seems to be continued regurgitation of last year's strategies. I'll read your response as an opportunity to vent/explain/whatever.
For redundancy, you want more smaller drives rather than fewer larger ones. For a small office, you may want one server, not two or three. The continued focus on 3.5" form factor drives is infuriating.
We've had good success with an 8-drive for hypervisor strategy here, which usually works out to three datastores of RAID1, and then two spare disks. This allows you to do two SSD datastores and a HDD datastore, or three of a single type, and be fully redundant, with spares, so that you don't have a critical "fix it now" emergency if a disk fails.
For NAS, 12 hard disks in RAIDZ3 can provide a large chunk of high reliability storage, but most of the vendors have been implementing this as 3.5" storage in the typical SC826 style chassis. This makes sense in some scenarios, and certainly if you want to go offering a system with 120TB of raw storage in 2U, that may be a good way to go. A lot of people get hung up on trying to make HDD faster, but we're finally at a point where it really isn't unreasonable to put the stuff that needs faster storage on SSD, and use HDD for slower "nearline" style storage.
So I've been finding the idea of a 16 bay NAS more compelling, and with the availability of 4TB 2.5" HDD's, you could make a 12 drive ZFS RAIDZ3 (12x4TB=>36TB) for around $1200 if you're shucking, plus four SSD's for fast storage, and the Xeon D with its 128GB capacity gives you sufficient memory to run that alongside other workloads. And ~~100 watts. Really? I can get a competent eight core virtualization platform like the 7TP4F with 128GB of RAM, a 24 bay chassis, with local RAID storage for VM's, and NAS storage, all for around ~~$5K? WOW.
So, hey, Supermicro, please go and release a lower watt rating, redundant, high efficiency SQ PSU module. Not everyone wants to run heavy iron in their 24/26-bay chassis. I'd also love to have a shorter chassis option optimized for the Xeon D form factor boards, with an appropriate air shroud, but that's just off in the wishful thinking department...
I'm seriously considering retiring some of our newer gear in favor of Xeon D. Watts drives so much of the TCO. Your power protection and power distribution is simpler with lower watts, your air conditioning requirements are reduced with lower watts, the noise level is reduced with lower watts, gear typically runs cooler and things like drives last longer with lower watts.