I work on agent tooling on the software side, and the pattern you describe is exactly what we see there too. Generation got fast and cheap. Validation stayed slow and human. In software the review queue became the bottleneck.

In firmware it sounds worse, because the queue was a physical board!

Curious how you triage the gaps your validation rigs find. When the sim and the board disagree on timing, how do you decide which one is wrong? And how often is it the board setup rather than the model?

Good luck today, rooting for you!