I worked in a recording studio for a few years, and my impression is that for pop production, a lot of sound experiments are not reproducible. There are certainly fundamentals (e.g. understanding microphone design and placement techniques) but the random factors loom large.

Success depends less on applying principles in a straightforward way and more on being able to recognize when something is compelling and doggedly experimenting until something clicks. The story of the TR-808's design feels familiar.

You're right. The guitar sound in Dire Straits' Money for nothing is an experiment that couldn't be reproduced in another studio in NYC, even when placing microphones and speakers in the same random locations:

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/classic-tracks-dire-stra...

And Phil Collins' gated reverb drums, one of THE sounds of the 80's, were discovered through another random placement of microphones, although (un)luckily this time it was easy to reproduce:

https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/8/18/16162440/recording-stud...

Re: a lot of sound experiments are not reproducible.

A lot of early Moog synthesizer users complained about the inconsistency. They'd get a "great" sound in the studio, but on stage it sounded different. It was one of the reasons for slow adoption by general pop groups. While many musicians thought they were "cool sounding", their inconsistency kept them out of mainstream.

Kraftwerk often made their own circuits so they could control and tune them as they saw fit. It's one of the reasons why they were (arguably) first with the "80's sound" in the 70's.

I concur. Made some music with a buddy and his ARP 2600, tweaking the knobs. Suddenly we both started dancing, ecstatically. Then the pitch started to drift downwards, detroying the vibe for me. He worked the machine and told me it is the same as before, but it did not feel as great as before at all.

They didn't expect this thing would become so massively popular and probably figured they had more than enough supply of this part to produce every unit they'd ever need to make.

It doesn't sound like it was intentional, I can imagine a rep or distributor giving the guy a bag of them without any proposed purpose, and the founder or an assistant found they were well suited for this task in an experiment.