I think you're underestimating the amount of curious kids who are more on the electrical engineering side of things. Who, sure, probably won't get to play with

I think you're underestimating the amount of curious kids who are more on the electrical engineering side of things. Who, sure, probably won't get to play with a CPU fab line, but then again that's somewhat like sending kernel contributions is to "tinkering with Linux". It really is a just question of any level of hobbyist-accessibility (think photo-etching 2 PCBs of less sophistication vs. making a run of 100 perfect 3-layered PCBs in a factory) - and I've seen quite a lot of projects popping up around FPGAs lately that seem to indicate they're starting to approach the Arduino-ish level of approachability (though it's still obviously very far). RISC-V just might be one of the things on the way to a whole "sillicon-tinkering" scene, so I'm pretty hopeful.