When people were smart enough to use a 22-cent CD4017 instead of a 50-dollar FPGA to implement a 10-stage one-hot, people did that with schematics.

Nowadays, folks aren't that smart. They buy and sell things that only barely work, like cellphones, for example.

Put a few old timers who learned how to read schematics in a room, and, within minutes they all agree on what the schematic means. Put a dozen HDL experts in a room with the 1000-page listing that an 'E' sheet of schematics represents, in a room, and after two months, you'll have at least 13 opinions. How can you work with that?

RE