Not really true. Even hobbyists can happily solder today's tiny parts. Even BGAs. You can order chips overnight, and there are many adaptors to let you breadboard with them. Where signal quality concerns prevent breadboarding, someone in China will produce a one-off board for you the same day and mail it to you overnight. If you have more money, you can engage a contractor like Foxconn that have offices in the US. Send them revisions at 9AM, drive over to their office, have the new version to test that night. (You teach them how to manufacture your board in the US, and then they mass produce it in China.)
Nobody is having problems getting prototypes going quickly these days. We have much better debug and test tooling today. We have factories for prototype runs available literally overnight.
The reason no hardware hackers are making pen tablets today is because you can go on Amazon and have one delivered to you for $20, same day.
Today's big problem is supply chain issues for manufacturing in quantity. You'll spend 1000 hours of software engineering effort for a certain microcontroller, QA test it on your prototype board, and then find that the microcontroller family is no longer made (or has indefinite lead times). You then throw the software away and delay the project another year.
Nobody is having problems getting prototypes going quickly these days. We have much better debug and test tooling today. We have factories for prototype runs available literally overnight.
The reason no hardware hackers are making pen tablets today is because you can go on Amazon and have one delivered to you for $20, same day.
Today's big problem is supply chain issues for manufacturing in quantity. You'll spend 1000 hours of software engineering effort for a certain microcontroller, QA test it on your prototype board, and then find that the microcontroller family is no longer made (or has indefinite lead times). You then throw the software away and delay the project another year.