Ahhh...see, when I ran into the Academic Crapwall by the time I hit grad studies, my view on music had been so firmly formed that when I started dealing with the typical overinflated academic composition egos, I was ready to swing and not cringe. A lot of my formative work prepared me for that...constructive undergrad influences, the Nashville (my original hometown) proximity, numerous personal experiences, and a strong musical compass that took a lot of work to forge (still ongoing, tbh). I can recall switching studios after handing in a killer electronic work, informing them that I was changing because no one had the right to tell me how my music was to be composed. Besides, I'd done a number of "don'ts" in the work that this sooper-geenyuss electronic music prof could not detect... and that was very much an "emperor has no clothes" moment. If he couldn't hear what I'd done, then he had no business telling me how to do what I did in the first damn place!
Similarly, I ran into another "sooper-geenyuss" at Illinois that barged into my studio work (something which, in Nashville, could find one on the receiving end of an airborne ashtray if the engineer was in a particularly foul mood) and started asking me a bunch of "why the f**k are you asking me this right now?" questions, notably "What are your influences?". When I mentioned the Berlin School aspects to him, he huffed and looked down his nose (no shit! like in a cartoon!) and stated imperiously "we don't deal with such things here." Yeah? Well, eff that. He also tried to explain to me why I "didn't know" how a pair of Symetrix gates (the same model I have two of to my immediate right in my own studio) in the Moog lab were used...yeah, ok, sure, they're not the more complicated Valley People Dyna-mites I was so fond of at the time, but it's not like there's anything complicated there. Used 'em anyway in a repeat of the above trick...and the prof failed. Why the hell would I study with someone who didn't have the expertise to sort out when their own rules were being run over roughshod?
Some years later, I was on a festival bill with Terry Riley, and during some downtime, Terry asked me about my background. Note that...NOT "influences", but "what did you actually do?" So, I mentioned my early industrial and ambient stuff and the point that I'd been majorly deep in the punk scene at the very end of the 1970s when it finally hit Nashvegas. And at that, Terry interrupted me...and said "That. That's important stuff, that punk aspect. NEVER lose it!" Well...ok, then! But thinking about it, I'd not lost it, and it had successfully kept me from being cowed by diddly-crap morons who had the benefit of the right papers on the walls of their offices. Thanks, Terry!
But anyway...now, hold up here...you work with custom designs in wood. And you get what's needed for housing modular synths. It would seem to me that there's a rather interesting opportunity here. No, modular cases aren't the same as fishing tackle, but there's a line there to pursue, it seems like. And there IS a "hole" right now in intermediate-sized cabs, the 120hp+ and 3-4 row range. True, you have Doepfer's Monster cases and Behringer's teasing some 2 x 140 hp stuff that may or may not ever be released, but for the most part there's nothing happening in that 140-ish hp range. And there should be, because some builds really would benefit from having that much room to spread into. Something to think about, perhaps...