In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time.

If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations.

It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more developers had access.