Quote Originally Posted by mister_e View Post
but.. come on.. sot-23 mosfet or digital transistor (yeah those with built-in base resistor) would never be that big to mess a PCB space
That's exactly the reason I started adding a load of extra thru-via's on my designs a few years ago, even if they're only connected to traces on one side of the PCB. I try to add at least one via near each and every pin on every component on a PCB, except the OSC lines of course. At least that way you can run a length of wire to a (insert part here) to fix up a problem like that, or in my case, you can cut 2 traces, and run 2 jumpers to cross a couple of RX/TX traces that got mislabeled during design. Might make the board a bit more electrically noisy (not sure, never had something like that tested), but it's saved my butt more than once.