this "one guy" here. I would say that the availability of open access cards is almost excellent these days, at least in EU. The quality of those easily available cards (chinese) is questionable though. But there are cards available from other vendors as well (most notably NXP)
HN is nice indeed, but the awesome work would be more effective with less HN ;)
I have been thinking for a long time about opening a webshop for "pre-verified cards" that would come with an open source SDK and as much docs as possible. Maybe that would help (but would still only ship to "western world").
