You might be able to get the average person on board if approached from a repair specifications angle. What a given part does, what size it does it within, whe

You might be able to get the average person on board if approached from a repair specifications angle. What a given part does, what size it does it within, where it links up to other parts (with what sort of links), and how well it does the thing are all facts. After knowing those facts a 'cleanroom' implementation of a generic part shouldn't infringe on anything. Convince the average person of that, and then extrapolate that to making a machine that responds the same exact way to a 3rd party's recipe. Often, given physics and current or near possible tech, there's only a small number of possible answers, and for a given set of criteria one is going to be 'the best' answer. Physics and Math are tools that express how nature works.