Well, nothing is perfect and hardware is no exception. We'll have to admit that all projects have 3 primary constraints: time, resource and scope and one core y

Well, nothing is perfect and hardware is no exception. We'll have to admit that all projects have 3 primary constraints: time, resource and scope and one core yield: quality. The nature of defects/bugs is really miss-map of expectations to implementations, it does not really matter it's software or hardware and hardware bugs are possibly more fatal than software bugs in some situations. There are lots of examples: Therac-25, Infinia Hawkeye 4, Boeing 737 Max, and almost all recent Intel/AMD CPUs, which are more relevant to this topic. You can see that it's really hard to tell whether it's should be software or hardware defects, either way there would be valid points to argue otherwise. Nonetheless, I do agree your assertion that "Stakes are 100% the reason most tech is crap.". As a result of the limitation mentioned earlier, there must be some trade off or you can never wrap up the project. Stakes just make things worse and they tends to push engineers to cut corners in pursuing profits. The only thing looks better for hardware is that if you went too far cutting corners, it will not work stably at best or even does not work at all. For software, defects can easily be covered up and the end user might not have noticed it in the first place.