...should have gotten an APL keyboard. ;) Or a Knight keyboard at least.

Virtually anything in modern industry does. That's hardly an argument against solar cells. Is there a law of nature saying you're required to have those toxic compounds leak, otherwise the panel won't work? No? I thought so. Compare this with, for example, gasoline car exhaust...

Well, that's true. But even 1M transistors for a core might be a bit too much. Aside from the problems with validation, you wonder what other interesting choices for HW design we could have had with much simpler cores. Evolutionary optimization of everything below late-stage compiler intermediate code, perhaps? That would presumably be a massive undertaking, but perhaps very valuable in the long run. I don't think we have any idea how the existing systems fare in the larger universe of potential architectures. We just hope that they are good. But doing this with complicated systems is much more difficult than with simple ones.