Interesting, I've got the exact opposite experience. Small to medium production runs are always a bit of a pain, because you have to do a lot of coordination w

Interesting, I've got the exact opposite experience. Small to medium production runs are always a bit of a pain, because you have to do a lot of coordination with the factory when it comes to tooling. You have to ship a custom programmer, get them to install the drivers on whatever OS they are using, and then find a way to write custom code to interact with the programmer and deal with all the possible error conditions. The RP2040? A simple script which detects the presence of a RPI-labelled flash drive, copies a file, and repeats. Written in half an hour. Drivers? Not an issue. Hardware? Everyone has a USB cable lying around already. Error conditions? It either succeeds, or it doesn't - the OS handles the rest.