The idealized goat farmer will make a better musician than the one who simply uses others' samples. To bring the analogy back home, the programmer who understands silicon and circuits is better equipped than the one who relies on massive dependencies.
I used to think embedded systems (software) engineers were the be-all-and-end-all until I started looking into how my router worked (or didn't work - dhcpd had crashed).
How can you take Buildroot [1] and break it so badly? A mishmash of Broadcom SDK and ODM Makefiles that will only compile on RHEL5 on a Tuesday [2].
