> Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme

> Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc. Or power, plenty of battery powered things in the hobby space where using discrete hardware optimized for low power usage is necessary. Discrete hardware doesn't have to be an ASIC, it's still possible to string together a opamps and other SMD parts pretty easily these days.