[therealcamino]

I think several of the slightly negative responses are because the article is about "creating a side project for a specific user segment...in a tiny market," plus discussion of business considerations, and the headline suggests something much broader.

The HN audience has folks from all aspects of hardware design, from architecture, to RTL coding, to physical design, or hobbyists programming FPGAs, etc., Saying "hardware was an entirely new world for me. I found it to be an unforgiving, harsh, complex terrain," just sounds wrong to them, like you're drawing conclusions about a huge field based on a narrow hobby project.

You seem to have set out to write an opinionated piece with a particular point of view, and said in your intro that you were going to be controversial, so you must have expected not everyone would agree with everything you said.