Hardware vendors only want to support platforms if they know it's profitable or good for the company in another way.
If you want to effectively support hardware you need to know where the most problems are, what hardware is used the most frequently and what hardware causes the most problems.
This information can be gathered via a survey. Although the HWD project has already gathered quite some data, it isn't as extended as it could be. An ethical problem could be that the participants to the HWD project didn't agree with their data being shared with third-parties.
What I suggest is to start a separate survey in cooperation with other distributions and maybe even hardware vendors to collect information about what hardware is used and if it causes problems. This would include devices like mobile phones(for syncing), printers, cameras and more.
It would give two main highscores per kind of hardware: one for the most often used hardware, and one for the hardware with the most problems.
The results of this project, with an open license, should be published on the internet and actively be shared with hardware vendors and upstream projects. If they know which of their products are used most often or cause the most problems they know what areas deserve the most attention.
