I share your supportive and generally charitable attitude here. I don’t have to understand the constraints they choose for themselves in order to admire that they’re working within them.

For example, I had a reaction to their ethical objection:

> During our initial experiments with porcelain, we were immediately aware that the higher temperatures, and therefore electric consumption, were not compatible with our standards for ethical hardware.

If an ATMega IC is in bounds, would solar-sourced electricity be in bounds? Maybe accumulated in rust batteries if lithium is out for supply chain reasons? If you’re seeking to avoid electricity in general, would technologies like bellows and charcoal-making get you where you needed to be?

Of course—as they demonstrated—why do all that, when the local clay and stick fire work just fine! In that sense, my pre-conceived requirements would have gotten in the way of my learning what they learned.

So often we’re stuck so far down the road of “the way things are done” we forget how many of those technology choices reflect path dependence along the road to maturity, rather than the One True Technique… good on the authors for developing within different, human-scale production constraints.