Re: Gatekeeping
In all honesty universities don't call themselves woke normally - in the rare times they do it's to poke fun at the right wingers who hate education/research in those times between having their life saved by vaccines, hospital treatments, drugs invariably using telecommunications networks and tiny computers to tweet about it over the world wide web.
There is always research going on in improvements to process - it might not be 'high profile' but it is there.
Tax money... Yeah, that's a can of worms, depending on your country the headline figures shown in the papers are there to make a point - once that's split 'per university' and then via departments and courses (considered of value) - not a lot of that is really going to research.
The majority of research funding tends to be private or directed by a 3rd party to solve a specific problem.
There are further political pressures in all countries - suffice it to say, the governments of the world would rarely back making the lives of hobbyists easier (Certainly not the current one in my country).
Currently, as you've identified (and as mentioned elsewhere in replies) - there are some really nasty chemicals involved in fabrication processes, frequently other things you can't get unless you're a lab with good reason and then things like rare earth materials to change the properties of materials in tiny ways. In domestic markets there'd always be the fun of someone dumping the left overs down the drain or in the normal waste - some of this stuff survives water filtration, so that'd be fun for all the family.
In short, it's not quite as simple as Universities 'gate keeping' the tech - you'll find a lot of gatekeepers, most of them for a good reason (currently).
3D printing of electronics is already a research target (primary application in space and future long distance exploration). So someday yes - it's likely chips will be printable if they are not already... Whether those chips still use materials that are restricted is somewhat partially down to the audience for it all (more research will be done if it's something everyone wants to do, that's how capitalism works) - but we can all hope we can someday, it's just not today.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
