What you are saying is that any software offered today requires rented time on actual hardware with minimum usage amounts? That is going to be tough to work around. The beauty of a project like this would have been to basically design the hardware in sections and a few key people putting it all together.
What i mean is that the foundry, for example, TSMC has design rules. Only when you follow these design rules a chip can be produced. It was simple with older nm ASICs. One could create the logic and later make the chip so that it can be produced by following the rules. Now you cant do that at the end only anymore. You need the design software all the time while developing because the materials and tech to produce the conductor pathes are so vulnerable that a following production step could hurt everything. So the design software has to check all the time while developing if the production process will work with it.
So the difference is that you now need the expensive design software all the time. If you want production tech that uses very small process nodes that arent really standard yet it gets even more complicated and so on.
I dont believe that its possible to create a competitive chip now anymore. If you go to develop 40-28nm then it takes so long to develop that the costs and the development of the bitcoin network will bring everything down to rubbish. We thought about building an ASIC that is partly old process node but partly a very low process node. So that the critical calculations can be done very fast. But that wont work too. Its possible to create such process nodes but the price is not reasonable. And to develop the tech you need design software and rules that have to be developed first. So there are enough problems even when there would be the funds to the machines to create the wafers on your own.
So we stopped thinking about developing ourself a half year ago. Bitcoin is way too fast that there could be a chance to make that successfully. I dont see a way how this could be done. And that not even takes into account the risks like non working chips, boards and so on.
I believe this "Asic Goldrush" is over for developers. A couple made it, more failed and some even scammed. I might be wrong though of course. Im no professional, i only sat together with some others, called design software sellers and producer for machines that can be used for creating wafers yourself. All in order to check out all ways possible to raise the chances for a profit at the end.
