Indeed, it just seems inconceivable that a company with Samsung's experience and institutional knowledge about Li-ion technology could so thoroughly and irreparably botch something like this.

Li-ion in 2016 is, outside of the occasional 3-5 years-away breakthrough story, boring, a mature technology. One would think the best practices for safely building power supplies around it would have been settled on years ago.

Or: Am I wrong and there are in fact several competing standards in the industry right now? Is there actually some present innovation in Li-ion that Samsung may have utilized, in retrospect prematurely, in the Note 7?