Because I want to play with original chips. Many of them are in DIP sockets and are 5V. Not to mention linear and analog functions! No matter what, there's

Because I want to play with original chips. Many of them are in DIP sockets and are 5V. Not to mention linear and analog functions! No matter what, there's always wires or traces between packages. When I want to do FPGA, I start with an IceStick or BlackIce board (Lattice ICE40 FPGA). But then it comes down to interfacing it to some other chip. So if I make a little PCB that needs more than 16 I/O pins at the edge, I've got myself into extra ribbon cable to jumper to more I/Os.. I even made one wire-wrap board with 4 socketed 74LVC245 level shifters that the BlackIce board would plug into. From there, I could do what I wanted. I agree that damaging your wires is a serious risk. I guess I'm lucky that this never derailed me. I follow the color rule: blue on the bottom layer, yellow on the second. No daisy chains! Rather than unwrapping to get to a hidden blue wire, I can just cut it. Also I should mention that I'm not doing anything above 25 MHz.