I love Taobao as much as the next guy, but for this series, I'm focusing on general-purpose MCUs from reputable, North American-based distributors, or directly from the company. And I'm trying to find the "best" (obviously subjective!) representative from each family, which typically means the representative from the family that is as close to $1 (without going over).
The main reason I'm doing it this way instead of including Taobao/AliExpress/eBay/weird Newark closeout specials is to make sure I'm judging "value" instead of just functionality. If all the parts I'm reviewing cost about the same, it's easy to look across the numbers and the reviews and identify good and bad values. Since a lot of these parts I'm reviewing (like the Nuvoton N76) struggle to hit $1 as it is, if I'm using Taobao pricing, at that point, I'd be comparing a $1 STM32F103 with 15- or 20-cent 8-bit MCUs, which doesn't seem useful for readers.
The actual, absolute price isn't particular important, as long as it's consistent across all the families. I could have easily said $2 @ QTY=1, or $0.80 @ 1000 units. It's just that $1 @ 100 units seemed like a nice sweet-spot for general-purpose MCUs.
And I think there's still a lot of value when operating with this constraint. For example, I hope that if you read my review of the STM32F0 and end up really liking the peripheral libraries, development ecosystem, and functionality of the part, you'll notice that you can get F103s on Taobao for cheap, and feel confident in the performance, functionality, and ease-of-development you'll get out of the part. That's how the series remains relevant to bigger/fancier chips, as well as making purchases from much cheaper markets.