[zwieback]

Totally agree, tools are important and key to real understanding of what you're building. I worked for many years as a tooling and manufacturing engineer (non-software). Our typical product development cycle was something like this:

1) R&D engineer: invent something

2) Process & tooling engineer: invent the manufacturing process and design the tools to build the thing

3) Manufacturing & product engineer: monitor and improve product quality and yield

Many software companies, especially startups focus too much on 1 and not enough on 2 and 3. Also, there's always some friction between the R&D and process/manufacturing camps, the former typically look down on the latter as technicians or paper pushers. In the other direction there's often the perception of R&D as being out of touch with the real world. Also, it's easier to hide incompetence in R&D because the metrics are foggy.