Suggestion for producing a highly quality large amount of pedals

[gordo]

I wish that the bootweek builders would also offer to sell their PCB's for the DIY crowd. I understand that most guitarist are just plain lazy, or suffer from solder insecurities. And that is fine. But methinks by selling PCB's to the DIY crowd they can cater to that market too. And not see their designs get reverse engineered online and PCB's of them sold by others.

I don't really think the "just plain lazy, or suffer from solder insecurities" comment holds true for the vast majority of players. For them it's a tool that's already been invented and there's no need to reinvent.  Much in the same vein that I appreciate using a microwave oven but have no intention of figuring out how to build one from scratch, even if Whirlpool offered me a board for sale.  For us it's love of the building game.  For them it's love of the playing game.  The two have very little in common.  Well...other than your wife/significant other is mad at you for spending too much time and money at either...

From a small builder's view, unless you are trying to support a DIY crowd (who will reverse engineer your product if they want it anyway), the trade off of making a few bucks a board vs any sort of technical support is going to drain away too much of your time to be viable.

Case in point: this place.  Madbean is set up to support a DIY community, meaning that there are enough of us here to create somewhat of a self maintaining tech support system allowing him the time to push forward to expand the  content of this place.  That is relatively rare in the PCB world and has taken a long time for him to achieve.  Most of his peers need to be WAY more hands on in order to survive.  If it were Function(FX) that was started first there would be very little incentive to produce boards along side pedals because getting and maintaining a support system would take away from the core business (which is, of course, getting filthy rich in the pedal business) 

To put our side of the electronics industry in perspective...that's the reason the companies like the former Reticon don't reissue the highly sought after SAD1024 bbd chip.  Not only is the DIY faction a very tiny segment of the pedal industry, but the entire pedal industry is a VERY tiny segment of the electronics industry.  These days it's not about being a "good person" in the business (sadly), it's about economy of scale.