Of course it’s a small operation, and so isn’t under the same pressures of a big operation. When you’re a boutique operation your only differentiation is quality. Your rule of thumb is unfortunately probably pretty good in the general case.

The problem is with that 'any':

> Drawing on more than 30 years of embedded engineering experience, David Such takes you through the complete engineering process

Would David Such ruin his reputation after 30 years building it?

Since you're currently asking humans to explain this to you and not LLMs, you've already got your answer.