Take this with a grain of salt because my exposure is admittedly limited, but what I've seen of the "research community" is that many of them are pro-DRM, pro-anti-user-security, and are mainly interested in furthering such technologies without considering the wider implications. I once asked someone with a vision of making all systems written with formally-verified provably safe languages what he thought of jailbreaks, console homebrew, and all the other exploits that bring freedom. His response was that they shouldn't exist.

I'm not really pleased with what Intel has been doing with x86 recently, but fortunately it wasn't always that way and a huge amount of software and documentation was created during that time so we don't have to start from nothing at all. IBM released schematics and BIOS listings for all the models of PC up to the AT. Thus it could be better to "fork the PC"; but individuals have designed and built their own CPUs and complete systems before, so a from-scratch design is still quite doable for a crowd:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~daveb/simplex/ringhome.html

http://www.homebrewcpu.com/