Even if you're not a hobbyist, development costs will dwarf BOM costs until volumes are in the 10s of thousands - saving even a dollar per item isn't worth it if you add a few months of development time due to obscure tooling or silicon bugs.
Saving a dollar per chip(what is an item?) is going to add up to 10s of dollars per unit. I am confused.
I get what you mean regarding development costs. The cost of putting a bunch of popular/well supported components on a custom PCB is way too high. Just like the market for glue languages like python is big in the software industry I think the market for glue design tools is big in the electrical engineering industry.
If you can cut the cost of development down by 50%, the number of projects that are worth doing goes up by more than 100%. Each individual project might be less important than the next but since the cost is low it is worth it.
