I guess the tone came out wrong. I understand why we got the HW we got. In this case it wasn't even about cost. The power available to the device as a whole was so low that we were counting microamps. It was all incredibly tight:

Just switching on the wrong SoC feature would bring the entire thing outside the envelope. Even the contents of the passive LCD affected power consumption in adverse ways. Showing a checkerboard pattern could make the device fail.