And accidental damage to the insulation (or cracking caused by heat or corrosive environments or excessive inductive motion of the coil or ....) causes shorts in which the current does short-cut along the way which makes the magnet less effective.

While linux-kongress.org/2009/slides/… (PDF link) is getting to be quite antique it is still worth skimming. Money quote: "Note: gcc is smarter than the video codec programmer on all platforms." (where all platforms means big desktop machines in this instance). Now, embedded platforms probably doesn't have quite the ultra-slick optimization support that the main desktop platforms get, but you should definitely try the compiler.

In particle physics the traditional reasons for not doing this seriously were the lack of room, money, and capacity to handle the thermal load.

In the context of experimental physics we rarely have treble and bass knobs, but we do have significant cable runs and get a lot of advantage from the two stage business.

A sort of meta answer to this (one that will give you a handle on how to think about these kinds of questions in general) is that non-trivial technologies have long requirements lists, and observing that a possible replacement system is better on one of them doesn't tell you much. You need to dig in and find the several limitation that characterize technologies and the breadth of the conditions under which the tech is expected to perform before you start a cost-benefit analysis.

Not an expert on the matter, but most commentary on the 555 claims that it is power hungry.

The last big analog computer I was personally aware of was mothballed about twenty years ago and dismantled five years later.

Stating the question in terms of knowledge always makes me worry that the interlocutor might be over-personifying things. On the off chance that this is going on, let me say again that the chip doesn't need to "know" it just has to be designed to to function in certain ways when that happens. The answer so far have explained how to accomplish that.

Related on Physics: Why don't waves erase out each other when looking onto a wall?

"Any particular age I should start avoiding?" It should have built in triggers. My first scope was a tube job from (I think)the 1950s that my father's employer had just written out of inventory (a memo went round that everything in warehouse #foo was going to the dump next week, get while you can). No built in triggers, though it did have a trigger input.

The short--short version is that you have to know what you should be measuring your signal against, of course.

@CamilBancioiu: Yes, that's why you need to connect it--mechanically!--it to a rheostat which controls the flow of the higher current. And the purpose of the spring is to allow you to have a smooth rather than digital transition as you turn up the current to the relay.