[bestouff]

Chip making is in a really sad state of automation. There's lots of money poured into very ingenious products, but the major incumbents have to real incentive to standardize, so you still have some unstructured file formats (SPICE) with different dialects veeery hard to parse correctly, you have ad-hoc APIs depending on vendor and software versions that all try to capture you into their ecosystem, you have half-assed attempts at standards (à la xkcd/927) that you can't rely on.

And this sad state of affairs shows no sign of evolving favorably. Closed-source software and corporate interests at their finest.

[rcxdude]

Also just the state of highly sophisticated but niche software (ecosystems) in general. It usually winds up super messy and only just put together enough to function for the small number of users.

[brookst]

Why would better standards be “better”, beyond just platonic affection for more standard things?