"I need to preface this by saying that I have very little faith in the worldliness or general sense of Silicon Valley hardware engineers. I have seen a long history of extremely poor decisions from that part of industry, so I will assume they made all the worst decisions."

Old school engineers designed bridges, dams, nuclear plants, transformers, etc. They took a serious oath and got a license. Software "engineers" -- and let's be honest, most are closet software engineers, even the "hardware" ones -- are not cut from the same cloth in approaching problem solving, to the major detriment of society. I never trusted them.