> the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools This is really what pushed me into just doing digital design as a hobby

> the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools This is really what pushed me into just doing digital design as a hobby and making my money elsewhere. It's understandable that chips companies are so risk averse (a bad tapeout or, worse, a major escape can cost the company billions) but it is really a miserable experience to have so much passion and ambition but never being able to do anything other than extremely conservative incremental changes over a decades long career.