> Of course against all of this, the analog EEs laugh at us and continue to make things that just /work/.

Uh, yeah, no. LOL. We just had an entire article dedicated to the weird and wacky ways that things can fail in the analog world (corrosion, light, standing waves, etc.). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14765868

There is a reason everybody moves as much of analog and RF circuitry into digital as they can as soon as they can.

Analog and RF are notoriously unreliable and disgustingly difficult to debug. Once things hit digital land, they become repeatable and debuggable.

Hunting down a stack smasher is nothing compared to hunting down some screwball oscillation in an amplifier.