While FAEs (field apps engineers) are helpful and readily available, they are constrained by their lack of product knowledge, and the unidirectional flow of ref

While FAEs (field apps engineers) are helpful and readily available, they are constrained by their lack of product knowledge, and the unidirectional flow of reference code and designs. On the design side, I hope that the energy and continued improvement the open source software community has will spill over to hardware. I think that would greatly improve the accessibility of the hardware world, and facilitate new product development and innovation. Proprietary hardware reference designs and tools (whether it be for schematic capture, logic synthesis) etc, while tried and tested, often lack the polish and open interfaces, hence extensibility, good open source systems have. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly glad we have Verilator and gEDA. On the manufacturing front, I feel your pain (mostly on behalf of my colleagues).