[random idea] Rather than worry endlessly about SOCs and radios not being open enough, why not build a protocol on top of blackbox components that eliminates, through some kind of encryption, the need for openness?

To push the argument to the extreme, even if you find a radio component that matches your requirement of free, it's still going to talk to a radio tower that you don't control, running a software stack that you don't approve. This problem never ends, unless you imagine some end-to-end channel that you control, and then you don't care about the lower layer's lack of openness.

Does that make any sense?