I miss the days when I had an oscilloscope with built in protocol analyzer on my desk, and a vector network analyzer, a power analyzer, plus a bunch of other equipments a few steps away. When I reach the stage that $$$ is no longer a concern, I am definitely going back to the hardware/RF industry.

Speaking of protocols, I have worked on some equipments that use nothing more than VCC, GND, data, and retry, and they actually worked reasonably well.