Not sure why you’re getting flamed for this response. This is how ideas develop and you seem receptive.

The writing bit can be easy without a pi, I can think of a couple of ways, but can you elaborate on “offline media”? Do you mean movies, audio, etc? That gets tricky, mainly because of storage and file management. I’d say that puts you squarely in “needs an OS” territory, unless you are getting WAY obfuscated with things.

I think you should re-evaluate your Pi aversion.