Why design new, low level systems when our stacks are built on old, debugged foundations and work "well enough"?

Who wants to think about cycles and bytes when everyone else is talking about gigabytes and "spin up another 1,000 instances" is the expected answer to every problem?

Is anyone hiring these people? Look at the SoC world, the stuff that's being made with the expectation of taking advantage of the public code ecosystem... Would you even want to work at a place like that? "Make the minimal system that passes tests; actual functionality is secondary" is not a good motivation.

Even the RasPi people have blobs of ugly and seekrit hardware; and they're the epitome of "open" systems engineering now, aren't they?