[cpgxiii]

Availability is often strongly correlated with technical maturity. Small brushless motors with FOC didn't become widely available and mature until really the late 2010s. Arguably the foundation of nearly all of DJI's product lines is due to their early mastery of small brushless motor control (drones, gimbals, lens controls, robots, etc), and that's a company founded in 2006, well after the events of the article.

You can get good control of brushed motors with just a couple of transistors. Good brushless control means FOC, which really requires a fairly capable microcontroller in addition to all the power electronics for variable-frequency drive. While brushed motors certainly have limitations, those were quite well understood by the early 2000s (to the point here that assessing whether or not damage had occurred was "just" a question of "have these few transistors suffered from voltage applied in an unintended manner"). Brushless motors involve way more components with way more integration required to make then small. Far more complexity and potential failure modes need to be understood.

[wolverine876]

> Availability is often strongly correlated with technical maturity.

I see what you mean. Yes, agreed.