It would be expected (by fools like me?) that recovery methods that worked on older drives would still work with the new layout, with restrictions on direct hardware access being the biggest stumbler; but the new generation of users (even among the pro programmers?) doesn't seem to have much interest in how the junk actually works.

I'd guess you would have to be a hardware (eg device driver) programmer or writing something very specialised to really want to go down to the hardware level.