Ive encountered this sentiment a lot from my hardware engineering friends, I dont know if its a side effect of the job or something, but they tend to value the

Ive encountered this sentiment a lot from my hardware engineering friends, I dont know if its a side effect of the job or something, but they tend to value the sort of "efficiency of exactly the right chip / protocol / whatever" over the "versatility / community / perceived technical quality " around the same. Sort of like a callback to Betamax VS VHS. - Hydrogen fuel cells are a better technology than batteries - Zigbee is a better wireless protocol than wifi - you dont need a RPi, an ATTiny and some transistors would work fine sure, but wifi is being improved for tons of use cases and Zigbee only really has the one use case just now, getting started writing code for x86 with a full OS is much simpler than for a microcontroller etc etc ultimately the network effect / whatever kick in and the popular stuff usually ends up winning IMHO