> 90% of the software I write works just fine in an emulator

As it should be. Investing some effort in my development environment has paid back every time.

If it has paid back every time, perhaps you are not investing enough effort?

(Only slightly tongue in cheek. At the margin, some of your efforts should fail.)

Actually you are probably right. And it's not just building the environment: also unit testing, simple baseline algorithms, etc... We have a tendency to skip them.

Whatever you build, you will need to change, as this is the nature of SW projects. Being able to make changes fast will be life saving at some point

Yep. I do control systems for 20+ tonne hydraulic robot arms (among other things). 90% of the work I don’t have to catch a plane for can be done at home.

> We don't even have nearly enough hardware to give every engineer access.

This is the problem I always run into too. An emulator should be standard on any system development program that has software interacting with hardware.