It sounds from their blog posts, they tried to crib some config details from the MSI Intel boards they had done work with, but it seems like a relatively small part of the story.

I bought one a few months ago because I had wrecked the PCI-E clip on my old ASRock X670E Pro RS, and it was my first time in a Micro Center. :P

What drew me to it was the large number of conventional PCI-E slots (one day I might want to dust off my old Hauppauge HVR-1250 or Sound Blaster Audigy-RX)

The one novel feature compared to other similarly priced B850/X870 boards is that it has 5GbE when most have 2.5Gb.

The tech people have done a terrible job of using their leverage.

They're inventing the cool hardware and infrastructure, but for some reason, they let the content people dictate terms. I want to see the LGs and Samsungs of the world announching "we're making this amazing 16k OLED panel, and the only interface it has is unencrypted DisplayPort. If you don't want to your precious movies on it, there are still stock traders who will buy it to fill with graphs or programmers who will fill it with StackOverflow tabs and vim windows."

Sure, Sony could try to make some sort of sealed box viewing system that never let the raw bitstream out-- by the darkness, they've spent the last 30 years trying-- but most of the content firms don't have the technical chops or the market power to make it happen. I can fully imagine them trying to sell multiple different set-top boxes, each of which is only capable of decoding one studio's DRM.

On the other hand, what ended up liberating the music market wasn't some grand audiophile product, it was the market full of $29 no-brand/minor-brand "MP3 players". It was such a fragmented market, running random bare-metal firmware on the cheapest MCUs available, that nobody except Apple could possibly make a play out of selling anything but DRM-free content.

It's probably a turtles-all-the-way-down problem.

Three or four blank lines is probably the least hostile and most foolproof way to handle addresses.

But the cart software has distinct address-line-1, address-line-2, city, state, zip-code fields.

And the CRM they export into has similar fields.

Probably to be compatible with some further pipeline of tooling going back decades.

I suspect if you go back far enough it ends at pre-/semi-computerized data processing systems which would print addressed envelopes and documents from stacks of Hollerith cards, using extremely rigid fixed formats that were probably fine for their original buyers, likely US-centric and old enough that they were just getting it to the right city and letting the local postman figure out the nonsense on the envelope.

I went year-make-model many years ago when I did an autoglass website.

The filtering value is big as you said, and the model year as a first filter is easy to type in, and probably gets you reasonably close if you're off-by-one. Accidentally picking an '05 Sonata instead of an '04 probably has similar parts, but if you pick Honda instead of Hyundai, you're way off in Wonderland.

It looks suspiciously like a Kensington Slimblade.

That makes me wonder if the functionality could be done on random off-the-shelf trackballs in firmware or drivers, in which case you're not a product, you're a feature.