This sounds like a good outcome. From my experience, the usual reason small labs setups use things like LabVIEW is that they are usually built by one PhD studen

This sounds like a good outcome. From my experience, the usual reason small labs setups use things like LabVIEW is that they are usually built by one PhD student without experience and this is the only way they can get something working in a reasonable time. But then the student moves on and the result is something that may work, but nobody can build upon. Still, the situation you describe is unstable because as soon as the budget starts to look uncertain that engineer is likely the first to go. I really wish institutions would take this problem seriously and set up e.g. a department wide development group, which could help build and maintain stuff like that and ensure continuity. Unfortunately this seems to be against the current trend of cutting costs. For example, at the university I used to be, they cut the small common electronics shop, which was a great resource since the guys there knew all about who had what equipment, kept spare parts from broken stuff, etc. But in the budget it looked like pure cost I suppose. It's hard to measure the value of common resources and nobody wants to pay.