Stands to reason then that they are not designing in the same sense, but configuring and customizing. People have been doing that for a while now on FPGA, or in hardware with 8080, and it's hardly anybody's kids. What's so "amazing" about it?

Dumb cores are a commodity now, which progressed in horsepower from their ca. 60 years old ancestors. I.e. the core is hardly innovative, so what is so amazing about it, technically?