I think some engineers and technicians get way too caught up in the test equipment on the bench and lose sight of what the hobby/profession is all about and the Rigol 832 is a perfect example of this.
My thoughts exactly, but put into words better than I could have done.
The problem for Rigol and many similar low end manufacturers is, that a huge fraction of their potential customers are not very skilled when it comes to analog techniques and technologies. In particular many beginners tend to focus exclusively on the pure digital domain, as they can rather easily and quickly get something worthwhile accomplished. Who need this old school analog stuff anyway? We'll just throw a good A/D at it, and do everything in the programming, right?
So at first blush it makes sense for Rigol to focus on the cheap frills, which can easily and inexpensively be added to the digital functionality. Add some LEDs, an LCD, some buttons and rotary encoders, and you have a huge opportunity for 'value added extras'. Better still, from the point of view of Rigol marketing, the beginner has a lot to talk about when 'evaluating' a product with many digitally implemented bells and whistles, and feel they can contribute meaningfully to the public debate.
Take my question earlier in the thread about whether the +5V rail ought to have had a +6V limit. Apparently people don't actually do any *testing* or *troubleshooting*, as opposed to just potentially wanting to use the PSU to power stuff. In my little world it is a 'done' thing to raise and lower rail voltages slightly away from nominal, as a natural part of testing and troubleshooting. I do that even for my hobby stuff, as it is easy to do. So to me having a low voltage rail with a limit of 'only' +5V feels a bit ... odd?
Similarly, thinking of your $300 RF FET here, no-one but you has yet questioned how well this PSU holds up to a bit of RF riding shotgun on the power rails. As I suspect you will be aware, then some PSUs can go completely nuts, if they see just a hair of RF on their outputs. On the other hand it is a near certainty that
Agilent's HP's Greybeards will have tested their PSUs to absolute destruction during development of their E36xx series and all the rest. They will know that their potential customers
will use the PSUs to power RF equipment with the covers off etc.