Is This the Past, or the Future?

We have a rainwater harvesting system, which comprises a large tank in the garden fed by rainwater, a submerged pump in the tank and a pump controller in a cupboard in the kitchen. Yesterday our washing machine that is fed from the rainwater had it's red 'Check input' light on. Not good. What was even less good was the water that had been squirted up onto the roof of the cupboard. The problem was a diaphragm that is used, I believe, in a pressure switch that the controller uses to determine that it has pumped enough and should switch the pump off. It had split, allowing water into the expansion chamber above it and out of an air bleed hole. 

You can just see the split on the front left of the diaphragm. Well, the obvious thing to do is to get a replacement part. A lot of the time this is not possible, because they are unobtainable or the unit is obsolete and parts are not available any more. Well, I was quite surprised when I found out that this part is indeed available (and in stock). That's mildly unusual, but what makes it more unusual is that my controller is now superseded by another unit. That unit uses an identical diaphragm. The new controller also uses a new lower power controller, but it has been designed with the same footprint and mounting as the old one, so it can be used in the old controller housing. I've not seen this level of parts interchangeability much, maybe not at all.  It means that the design of the new controller has seemingly foregone extra profit from people having to replace controller units in favour of allowing repair and replacement of parts.

This isn't the first problem I've had, a while back a capacitor failed, and I replaced it:

 https://trochilidae.blogspot.com/2018/02/rainwater-harvesting-pump-controller.html

Another surprise that happened during that repair was that the controller was built from standard ICs and components. It is not a microcontroller based design. There is no firmware. If the controller PCB fails it is possible to repair it or even make a new PCB. This controller appears to be repairable for quite some time to come. 

So is this a design from the past, where almost everything was repairable and electrical and electronic equipment even came with circuit diagrams? Or is it a design from the future that uses the minimum disposable parts and doesn't have built-in obsolescence?

Either way, I like it.