Comment by contingencies

So as neither an EE nor an ME (nor a qualified SE!) I've been in charge of some fairly complex mechatronic systems development for the last near-decade. IMHO the whole harness thing seems to be on the way out, excepting very specific situations where every last bit of weight really matters. Why? First, cost. Not having point to point means you aren't an off the shelf item, which means costs 10x immediately. Second, communications friction. While numerous providers can create arbitrarily complex harnesses as a commercial service, they generally disagree on everything from the manner by which cable qualities are specified to the sequence by which a termination should be made to what a length means with respect to a radius, etc. especially when crossing national boundaries. Third, complexity. Shared buses are harder to manage from a project evolution standpoint, and make it much harder to isolate and debug misbehaving nodes. Now I can see why all of this is worth it on a spacecraft, where weight matters, or in a car, where volume is assumed, custom connections are probably needed owing to a high vibration environment and every communicating component is probably either relatively well tested (auto grade transceivers) or relatively simplistic (window or door controller) or both, but for the rest of us where a smaller volume is assumed it seems to me harnesses are falling out of favor. Their chief benefit is weight reduction and nominal material cost reduction but the accrued costs in real terms outweigh these savings for the majority of projects, IMHO. Does this echo your own experience?