My vision might have been impaired by all those mc sticks with their different coloured side plastic thingys good to know they are still around.
Just the four that came to mind. I constantly see them posting pictures and updates. Foehammer is actually a local business. I've got 8 or 9 customs myself, and with padhacks, different consoles providing different amounts of power to USBs, different boards (paewangs, Chimps, Cthulus, PS360s), different sticks (don't even know what's in a Qanba), padhacks and custom pcbs have been far less than reliable. I will never take a custom stick to a tourney ever again after having multiple fail on me for no reason I, Toodles, or the person who wires my sticks could discern. Had a custom at a tourney that worked on every 360 at a tourney except one. At the same tourney, this stick didn't work if a Qanba was plugged in, but worked fine with every other stick. Three different EVOs, three different sticks, three different boards, and I had a problem at each one. Now I just take two mass produced sticks and I never have a problem. Other than carrying multiple sticks. That's a pain in the ass.
You'll forgive me if I prefer my "mass produced stick" that always works when I plug it in, no matter what stick, board, or pcb my opponent is using.
That's why I'd want a licensed pcb without homebrew or shady backdoor production. Of course the people behind the custom pcbs invested a huge amount of work in it and it's great that they work most of the time, but in the end they are still homebrew productions without access to all the knowledge hori/mc get from sony/ms when it comes to the inner workings. A clean licensed and easy to use pcb would be all that is needed. But yeah, wishful thinking since that would never happen. But once that'd happen I cannot see any huge points of failure that wouldn't also exist on the other sticks.
But perhaps I'm just a little bit sad because every stick one can buy nowadays is one of those huge, more expensive by the month ones that don't cater to me as a lover of smaller minimalistic sticks like namco, konami hyper stick or the early horis.