> The amount of time required to terminate a copper cable in the field is seconds,

This article is about Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables which are not something you can field terminate. They use twinax copper and have special modules on the end.

You are thinking about standard RJ45 terminated cabling for 1GBASE-T or 10GBASE-T, which is a different.

> That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned.

Direct Attach Copper has slightly lower latency than fiber, but the difference is negligible. Both have significantly better latency than 10GBASE-T through twisted pair cabling.