Aside from the business cycle reasons - Being a young chip designer, I'm severely disappointed in the hardware engineering culture. It is too hard to get ideas through anyone who is over 35 years old. Everyone thinks Perl is really great and Verilog is good enough. Even though both suck.

Basically, the older generation has killed the industry. Much like they did to aerospace.

The HW engineering firms should be leveraging SW open source projects and adapt them as needed. For example, why have an in-house Perl scripting framework on top of Verilog. Use Django or something similar instead.

The industry is too risk averse and overall poised.