Unfortunately, I am not a network engineer. So I don't know how I would approach this problem other than to try to make sure that the resulting hardware is easy to deal with from firmware and software.
I have worked with hardware directly and there is something inherently simple about some hardware APIs versus others.
What's more, the complexity doesn't entirely relate to the underlying hardware or protocol complexity.
The issue is, though, that reality is complicated. This is where the right foundations are important. It's not necessarily that the right foundations themselves have simple internals, but that the right foundations successfully tame the complexity of reality.
The best place to work on developing the right foundations is therefore precisely at such interfaces between the real world and the software world.
I have worked with hardware directly and there is something inherently simple about some hardware APIs versus others.
What's more, the complexity doesn't entirely relate to the underlying hardware or protocol complexity.
The issue is, though, that reality is complicated. This is where the right foundations are important. It's not necessarily that the right foundations themselves have simple internals, but that the right foundations successfully tame the complexity of reality.
The best place to work on developing the right foundations is therefore precisely at such interfaces between the real world and the software world.