Are embedded systems for the “do it yourself” person?

Most of my friends know I play the guitar (and those of you who don’t are bad bad friends). I’ve always loved tweaking around my guitars, desoldering and soldering them back, playing with the internal electronics and what not. I recently started thinking about “going all the way” and building a guitar out of scratch. It’s a pretty big project considering I don’t have wood working tools (or experience), I’ll eventually do it. Couple of weeks ago a friend remembered he had an article on building an acoustic guitar, so he sent it to me. Turns out it was from a November, 1964 issue of Popular Mechanics. It got me thinking, will there ever be do-it-yourself articles in magazines about building embedded systems? I know there are some electronics kits out there, but there is no programming involved. I mean some more “hardcore” embedded development with compilers, watchdogs and maybe even a small do-it-yourself oscilloscope. That would be fun, but I’m not sure if it makes sense. Embedded systems are custom hardware based, will there ever be really generic microcontroller modules that you can plug into whatever external hardware in a generic mechanical format? Or will embedded systems be always constrained to having the knowledge and budget to build your own hardware?