> I miss doing firmware engineering.

I remember my Apple II days (different platform, similarly constrained environment) where every game had a hard real-time multitasking core under all the code. In the Apple II it was particularly critical, because you didn't have programmable sound generators - you had to programmatically change the voltage of the speaker. If you were really crazy, you could do PWM and expect the electronics of the board would coerce your output square wave into something pleasant.

It never worked well, but it was still super cool.

> how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession

There will always be people who work to pay the bills, not to answer some inner call. I am happy - don't tell my boss, but I would do my work for free, including meeting users and extracting requirements (some colleagues say I'd be a master interrogator in another universe).

> that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen

I noticed that with mainframes and banks.

IBM makes some really amazing hardware at the very top of the market, but the companies who own those machines don't seem to think any competitive advantage can come from them - they are the cost of doing business. Because of that, the mainframe teams are often neglected.

I would even be happy to write code on the least sexy language ever invented, COBOL, just so it could run on the sexiest hardware ever built.

It might be related to patent portfolios. AMD might be reluctant to pursue something that can step on Nvidia's minefield. OTOH, you mention developer experience, and it'd be wonderful to have something less developer hostile than CUDA.

I remember my feelings when I learned how to use the Cell's SPUs and how much I didn't want to touch it with a barge pole after that.

> despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry in engineering difficulty and technical knowledge

RF engineering, in particular, is punishing. The subject is viciously hard (you think shared mutable state is hard? Ha!) and, as people pointed out, for most companies, hardware engineering is considered a cost sink, not a revenue driver, something to be avoided if possible. The only parts where it's not is where companies do vertical integration instead of external suppliers.

The fifth grade in me salutes the fifth grade in you.