OK, this is a fantasy idea, but it's an interesting one, I think, and perhaps appropriate to an 'open source' world.
The people here who make emulators for various classic calculators gave me this idea.
Why not design a new calculator first as an emulator? Make it available as a web page, perhaps, so that people can try it out.. Make suggestions on functionality, key layout, etc.
I'm not suggesting 'design by committee' but rather feedback by interested and thoughtful potential users.
The real fantasy is that a day might come when it could actually be made and there might even be enough preorders to pay to have it made.
By the time it is ready to be made, if the project is approached properly, the software at least should be debugged.
As for the hardware... Has anyone ever heard of an 'open hardware' project? If anyone 'stole' the design and built it to sell, it would save us the trouble, right?
Such a project would not produce the 'next big thing' as far as I can see, but it could produce a product(s) that a certain customer base would buy, and the size of that customer base would be fairly well known by the time by the time a decision was made to build.
Steve.