[misnome]

> The (open) industry secret is that nobody actually uses the GUIs for anything other than analyzing build products (viewing floorplans, etc.); everything else is done through tcl scripts and Makefiles. This lets you both avoid the disaster that is the GUI portion of the tools and keep the entire project in a regular text representation (which means you can actually edit everything and check it into version control!).

I've sort of worked out this but it seems to be a weird mix of "you need to know what the UI is doing and why in order to avoid the UI". Getting that initial understanding seems a very high barrier.

(version control also seems to be something they manage to break on a whim over toolchain versions - maybe it's one of these hardware things where people just stick with the same toolchain version over the life of the product).