Not disagreeing, just adding more info: I think a lot of people on the manufacturing side react in a confrontational way because it's disrespectful to a manufa

Not disagreeing, just adding more info: I think a lot of people on the manufacturing side react in a confrontational way because it's disrespectful to a manufacturer when someone wants to use the infrastructure they've sunk years into as a playground with no hope of actually making it to production. If a manufacturer takes on 10 projects in a year and none of them do anything but endless prototyping they will quickly go out of business. Unlike in software where you make your money in the design phase. If someone has been trying to make a hardware project happen for years and they still don't understand this dynamic then there's not just an understanding issue, there's a track history of being a drain on other people's resources, or at least a willingness to be one. Establishing a relationship with everyone needed to make hardware has a much higher drain on partner resources than would happen if a consumer called a help line or a programmer read some API documents. Just making a quotation can take a week or more for a non-trivial hardware project, and prototyping is generally not that profitable either, if at all. An analogy: If someone came in here and said they wanted to hire CS grad students to work on Blockchain (but no clear idea of a specific problem) during the shutdown and was hoping they could pay them half of what they make on their already lower than market rate research stipend but still take advantage of the research topics they are involved in, I think expressing a certain amount of "hey, those are real people you are hoping to screw over" would be appropriate.