As someone who watches far too much "How It's Made" and other engineering porn, one of the things you start to notice is the amount of 'human glue' logic in pro

As someone who watches far too much "How It's Made" and other engineering porn, one of the things you start to notice is the amount of 'human glue' logic in production processes. Whenever there's a weird-shaped widget that needs to be inserted into a die at a funny angle, or some apparently trivial decision needs to be made, there's probably some poor bastard zoned into a hypnotic trance of 12 hour shifts putting tab A into slot B with the mild spice of danger that OSHA-minimum safety guards never really quells completely. Of those jobs, it seems on casual inspection that a surprisingly high percentage exist because some process engineer has cranked the numbers, and it's cheaper to get a human to do it than put the dev + maint time into an automatic solution. At USD22k, these things have got to be cheaper than even just wages for a single min-wage worker for a year, you might even throw 10-20k at consultants to customise it for you as well (and if there's a strong SDK/plugins market, plugin+custom is waaaay cheaper than full-custom) This could end up being the Manufacturing equivalent of a CMS.