I can see how a software developer could put hardware last, particularly when working with an established platform. I get that.

Coming from the other side of the fence, a place where we develop the hardware first and then bring it to life through software things are very different.

The first step in bringing up a not-trivial board is to go through a full characterization phase. This is where electrical, mechanical and short software tests are performed in order to determine if the hardware is operating according to requirements. Depending on the nature of the hardware this period can last months and require many re-spins (iterations where something is fixed or modified).

While this is taking place, and depending on the nature of the team, the application software is probably starting to be assembled on prototype hardware. In some cases this can't happen until you have actual hardware that works reasonably close to specs. Perhaps rev-1 hardware is used to jump-start software development while the hardware team goes through many revs in order to make adjustments and fix problems.

Seemingly weird hardware problems abound. I have been in situations where the signal is good at one end of a trace or cable and not so good at the other end. In the case of high speed design this can easily happen if there are problems with the design of the transmission lines carrying the signals. You can easily end-up with reflections that will wreck havoc on the signals as the go down the transmission line.

Another "weird" hardware issue in high speed design are signals that don't arrive at the destination within a specific timing window. Dynamic ram designs are one example of this. A clock is used to gate various signals at both ends of the transaction. Everything is sampled relative to this clock. If some signals, for example, control signals, arrive before, after or staggered with respect to their acceptance window you can have really weird effects.

With large FPGA designs you can have issues related to faulty design of the power distribution system. Power and signal integrity are major fields of study and truly necessary parts of modern electronics design. Traces on a board are like capacitors that need to be charged and discharged. If you have 200 traces switching from 0 to 1 simultaneously a lot of current will be require of the power system within nanoseconds (or picoseconds). If the power distribution system on the board isn't designed to deal with such transients you end-up with all manner of weird effects. For example, transmission lines might be perfect in impedance, crosstalk and time of flight yet signals arrive with lots of jitter and all over the place in terms of timing. The power distribution system on a board is like your heart, if it can't deal with demand you are not going to go from sitting to standing and then running without major problems.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. I could go on for pages and probably write a book about this. I've made enough mistakes.

And so, from the vantage point of a software engineer who also happens to be a hardware engineer blaming the hardware almost always comes first until the hardware is proven to be operating according to requirements.

In terms of the playstation issue on the original post. Well, from my perspective this is simply bad engineering on the part of those who designed the hardware. OK, this isn't the engine control computer on a Toyota. The sentiment is the same. Fault tolerant design is important, even for toys. Think consumer drones.