It sounds from their blog posts, they tried to crib some config details from the MSI Intel boards they had done work with, but it seems like a relatively small part of the story.

I bought one a few months ago because I had wrecked the PCI-E clip on my old ASRock X670E Pro RS, and it was my first time in a Micro Center. :P

What drew me to it was the large number of conventional PCI-E slots (one day I might want to dust off my old Hauppauge HVR-1250 or Sound Blaster Audigy-RX)

The one novel feature compared to other similarly priced B850/X870 boards is that it has 5GbE when most have 2.5Gb.