Perhaps it's context? I certainly agree that teaching someone chip design is a long process, so is teaching them to design a compiler. For me, it is a level of complexity which cannot be abstracted against. So, for example, it is easy to teach middle school kids to make working digital circuits out of TTL gates, but much harder to teach them how to bias a transistor amplifier to operate in its linear region. Similarly its easy to teach them basic game mechanics with PyGame or something similar but harder to teach them out to develop inverse kinematics and shader based rendering in the Unity engine. All about scale.
For me the big difference is that you see a program that does something, and if you're skilled enough write your own version that does the same thing, even if it was protected by copyright you "own" that new code you wrote. But if you saw some hardware that did something, and were skilled enough to implement that same thing yourself, if it was protected by patent, you couldn't share your version. Sad really.
Even an open source RISC cpu couldn't be built with out of order execution until those patents[1] expired. But now a lot of those patents are expiring and so its a great time to be in the bespoke hardware business.
I think scale matters but so does complexity. Do you really think someone building TTL circuits will be able to do a 48nm design without EDA that's useful for something? Stuff quickly gets out of control to the point that designers depend on tools to catch all the problems. I can use a method such as Cleanroom, basic abstraction, and a homebrew Oberon/BASIC/LISP to design software of about any size on the market's cheapest PC. The ASIC's? I'm going to be begging for synthesis (RTL at the least) & place-and-route before the day is up on a non-toy project.
The patent vs copyright law issue is huge. It's one of the reasons I haven't tried to bring a solution to market: can't defend the lawsuit and don't want to take one down. I thought on it a long time to try to determine a way to reduce risk.
There's still risks as Clive Robinson notes further down. Making sure the technology is produced outside the U.S. could help. As Clive noted, there was a hardware engineer both of us talked to whose company specifically avoided the American market due to all the patent nonsense. He said they did fine without it. Corruption in Congress on the issue means it's not changing anytime soon.
For me the big difference is that you see a program that does something, and if you're skilled enough write your own version that does the same thing, even if it was protected by copyright you "own" that new code you wrote. But if you saw some hardware that did something, and were skilled enough to implement that same thing yourself, if it was protected by patent, you couldn't share your version. Sad really.
Even an open source RISC cpu couldn't be built with out of order execution until those patents[1] expired. But now a lot of those patents are expiring and so its a great time to be in the bespoke hardware business.
[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US5666506