Alan Kay once said “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” I wholeheartedly agree. Further yet, I would add people who are really serious about hardware should also write their own software! I’ve been working with an embedded platform which I won’t name to protect the guilty, in which the JTAG pins on the processor are not connected! Not even to vias to aid debug! Nothing! Just the lowly serial bootloader. And it is not as though this is some commercial platform where they wanted to prevent reverse engineering (hey, you could blow the JTAG fuse to stop that)—it is an academic HW platform.