Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

I'm just a software guy, so maybe some hardware engineer can chime in (and I'd love to find out exactly what I'm missing and why it might be harder than it seems), but why on earth can everything not just be easily accessible and click nicely into place?

I'm paying multiple hundred dollars for most of these parts, and multiple thousands for some now that GPUs just get more and more expensive by the year, and the connector quality just gets worse and worse. How much more per unit can proper connectors possibly cost?

I still have to sit there stressing out because I have no idea if the PSUMobo power connector is seated properly, I have no idea if the GPU 12VHPWR cable is seated properly, I'm tearing skin off my fingers trying to get the PSU side of the power cables in because they're all seated so closely together, have a microscopic amount of plastic to grip onto making it impossible to get any leverage, and need so much force to seat properly, again with no fucking click. I have no idea if any of the front panel pins are seated properly, I can't even reach half of them even in a full ATX case, fuck me if I want anything smaller, and no matter what order you assemble everything in, something is going to block off access to something else.

I'm sure if you work in a PC shop and deal with this 15 times a day you'll have strategies for dealing with it all, but most of us build a PC once every 3 years if that. It feels like as an average user you have zero chance to build any intuition about how any of it works, and it's infuriating that the hardware engineers seem to put in fuck all effort to help their customers assemble their expensive parts without breaking them, or in this case, having them catch fire because something is off by a millimetre.

This space feels ripe for a radical re-design.

The typical way to use these is also inherently flawed. On the nVidia FE cards, they use a vertical connector which has a bus bar connecting all pins directly in the connector. Meanwhile, the adapter has a similar bus bar where all the incoming 12V wires are soldered on to. This means you have six pins per potential connecting two bus bars. Guess how this ensures relatively even current distribution? It doesn't, at all. It relies completely on just the contact resistance between pins to match.

Contrast this with the old 8-pin design, where each pin would have it's own 2-3 ft wire to the PSU, which adds resistance in series which each pin. That in turn reduces the influence of contact resistance on current distribution. And all cards had separate shunts for metering and actively balancing current across the multiple 8-pin connectors used.

The 12VHPWR cards don't do this and the FE cards can't do this for design reasons. They all have a single 12 V plane. Only one ultra-expensive custom ASUS layout is known to have per-pin current metering and shunts (but it still has a single 12 V plane, so it can't actively balance current), and it's not known whether it is even set up to shut down when it detects a gross imbalance indicating connector failure.