[mbreese]

I think one major factor is that it would increase unit costs in many cases. We are talking cheap chips that are sold in high volume. So any small increase in cost gets multiplied quickly. Combine that with competition (your competitor provides a less flexible chip, but it is $0.20 cheaper and has the IO ports you need), and you can see why we have the mess we do.

I think I’m many cases the flexibility is great during the prototype phase. But those are used at lower volume. When you move to production, you’d want to have the cheapest BOM as possible.