Gene S. Berkowitz wrote in
.net:

extremely
high integration components that might have only a two-year lifespan in
the market.

I take your point there. Thing is, that stuff will become code. While the
number of PIC's and AVR's and all are proliferating like mutating rabbits,
eventually people will get fed up and start to gravitate to the few types
that are most useful to them. The numbers and families will start to reduce
in number as the remaining ones start to more effectively cover the range
of operations most demanded from programmable IC's.

While new tech makes it possible for hardware to be designed on as
mercurial a basis as code has known for decades, that doesn't mean it's a
good idea. Human minds vary immensely too, but nature never makes our
brains look much different. We need to learn from that.