Is the Prime truly ready for prime time?

[debrouxl]

FWIW, if the non-CAS CX Nspire that you returned was manufactured earlier than, say, March 2013 (technically: hardware revision I and earlier), it's easy to make arbitrary OS run on it: the Nspire Linux port, the standard Nspire CX non-CAS OS... and whatever else.

The best platform for you depends on your usage.
The Nspire series is a closed platform, almost purely aimed at teaching / consumption of knowledge. The floodgates of native Nspire code are temporarily open once again, with yesterday's release of Ndless 3.6, but TI usually has the upper hand over the community wrt. locking down the platform.
The Prime is still a young platform, and like the early Nspire, it has its share of bugs and limitations. The PPL is good and very fast, while in its first few months, the Nspire didn't even have BASIC programming abilities, and nearly seven years later, the BASIC still cannot draw pixels to the screen or read individual keys from the keyboard.
Maybe wait and see for a little longer ? Your 50g is still a capable calculator, after all