Really depends which little corner of the pedal market you’re talking about. In the digital realm I would disagree, there are a lot of really interesting design

Really depends which little corner of the pedal market you’re talking about. In the digital realm I would disagree, there are a lot of really interesting designs from the past 5 years or so. Some of them hide complex dsp algos behind a couple of simple knobs, and some of them have full menus or fit an entire modular synth crammed into a pedal format. There’s also some really cool stuff happening with open source algorithms, for instance the popular clouds modular synth module is fully open source to tweak and port to new formats. There are other pedals that can run different formats of open source dsp algorithms. Even in the crossover analog/digital world (chase bliss being one of the biggest examples) there’s some cool and fairly new stuff happening, like fully analog circuits that are completely controllable over midi or other lfo type control signals. In the fully analog realm, yeah, there is a bit of what you could call cork sniffing, dressing up the same circuits that have been used for the past 30 years in a boutique package and selling it for twice as much.