reverse engineering is not a hurdle (let alone "the" hurdle) to have a proper it infrastructure and tools
It actually is in a lot of cases. It's pot luck if anything we buy will last long term, and companies see fit to dick us around as/when they feel like it. It's only because people are willing to violate the law that joe public is able to somewhat even the playing field. Even then, we've still created a society which produces rampant amounts of e-waste and abandons perfectly usable hardware because the barrier of entry is too high for anyone but rich billionaires to take over support or offer alternative ways to use said hardware.
People used to reverse engineer everything to make it more usable and it was considered normal to do so even as little as 25 years ago. For example, nobody in the know used the official, vanilla clients for AIM, MSN, ICQ. Instead, people would write programs to hook into them or replace them out with compatible clients entirely, and developers would even charge money for these things. These days, if you try to do that, you'll be sued or users will have accounts banned. People would modify routers, smartphones, televisions, DVD players and even games consoles (you think Action Replay was officially licenced?) irrespective of what the intellectual property owners wanted to give people better control over what they paid good money for. Nowadays, we're seeing products being artificially crippled post-purchase and the abuse of intellectual property legislation to prevent people from properly using what they paid for.
The truth is that we need both reverse engineering and free/open source software (with open hardware) to undo the damage.
"The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down." -- H.L. Mencken