Well. "potential" is always good ... so long as the price isn't too high. Think I'm gonna wait for the 5s.
From what I can gather so far, the p5's double the performance, but at about the p4 power consumption. That's worth it.
Alas Pi's were NEVER good for embedded, esp for "field" use where solar charging was part of the equation unless you wanted a BIG panel and battery. Last things I did like that used Arduino's - with cellular modems. You could cut the power consumption back to nearly zero between data samples. Tiny panels/batts worked.
Used correctly, you can do a LOT with a Pi ... they are really impressive tech. Just have to be smart about your code and such. I've been using P3s as 'motion' servers for security webcams for years.
A p3 can handle about three or four cams at a few FPS no problem. P4's are better if you need to format/resize said images for display. Have a big monitor that shows successive and sometimes multiple, in-motion, frames (what I'm trying to emulate at home) where the pix ARE resized/tweaked. Works great. P4-4gb.
Gotta go to lengths to keep the damned monitor from going to sleep though ... xfce4-power-manger and "caffeine" run in autostart seems to do it. "Power-saving" is an obsession these days, you have to go to lengths to defeat it. There's a "move-mouse" thing in TKinter (and Lazarus) that can be employed too - "move" the mouse one pixel every 5 minutes. Emulating a mouse move in 'c' is actually quite complicated, deep 'device' stuff.
HAVE had a few issues with the P3's though. After a couple of years the WiFi tends to fail. Had three do that. So far no such issues with P4s. Have one 'original' P1b+, the kind with fewer pins, that's been doing it's ONE thing since forever. Not net connected though and doesn't have WiFi. Recently updated the ANCIENT Raspbian to Bullseye basic version and new SD though ... should be good for another decade.
Just write it smart and you can go much further with a Pi than you initially expected.
Gotta look into how you can force Linux to run stuff on alternate cores ..... too much tends to run on ONE core, leaving the others with little to do. Got 'em, USE 'em.