“the population of the country barely has any capability to understand the purpose of circuit boards, diodes or capacitors let alone how to design a circuit to utilize them.”
Not all of them...but I feel that the percentage of capable young people is much smaller in propotion to “the rest” than it was even 20 years ago.
I buy most of my geek parts from China these days, and they are making original, creative sruff, stuff that clearly was never “invented here first”, and yes, it hurts for me to write this.
we barely do software any more. go into your local bookstore. software books use to be 3 or 4 isles. down to 1 in most book stores.
as for hardware, prototyping supplies are simply gone from retail. the last great store I saw that had loads of supplies was fryes in CA.