How come they make electronics hard as poss

[T.Jackson]

I don't think the internals force restrictions on anything. It's about the size of a head on a matchstick in most cases. But hey, I don't work in Silicon Valley, so I place no bets on anything.

[RussMartin]

Believe it or not, this same complaint surfaced many years before transistors and integrated circuits!

The issue (this was back when the Earth's crust was still cooling) was why can't the same kinds of vacuum tubes (i.e., diode, dual diode, triode, etc.) have the same pinout?

In those days (there was no Silicon Valley and you could still afford to buy a house in California), the issue had to do, always first and foremost, with both the electrical characteristics of the device and good engineering practice.

And, in the end, the same thing occurred--two vacuum tubes, identical or nearly so, would have different pinouts.