Concerning the general nature of static and electrostatic discharges (ESD), this is a hugely complicated field. I am a degreed electrical engineer, (retired) and where I worked, we had two high-tech men who's job it was to test and harden complex microprocessor controlled products against the effects of ESD. These guys used Key Tech and Schafner ESD simulator guns to hit products under test with ESD events. They could spend a month to harden a system, AFTER they had become very experienced. While the work they did, and what they showed me, was above my pay grade, they made very clear that when dealing with ESD, just connecting a few wires and thinking you'd solve your ESD problems is as unlikely as winning the current $900 million lottery.
The very nature of ESD events involves super fast rise-times, of just a few nano-seconds. When dealing with such huge bandwidth signals, the stray inductances of ordinary wires reduces them effectively to nothing more than open circuits (yielding them totally ineffective, even though an old DVM will show that at DC they are solidly to ground. Instead, effective low-inductance ground planes need to be established,,,, (very hard to do, even with multi-layer PCBS), with all possible discharge paths needing to be by-passed for the very highest rise-time discharges.
Where I worked, our company could not tell our distributors/installers, "Oh, you are having ESD problems? Figure out how to ground our products properly...…. good luck..." No, to be able to sell our products, we had to sell products which our staff had hardened against ESD. And it was the work of these two brainy guys, working with the development engineers (of which I was but one), who had to harden our products so ESD would not affect them. (These staffers would go through many iterations of revised ground-planes, adding micro spark gaps, voltage clamps, small capacitors, and other such hardware to re-direct ESD discharges into non-damaging and non-disruptive paths. And their work also involved lots of software self-checking to make our products self-correct if fault modes were triggered. (Top level efforts as I recall, were to eliminate device destruction, and then eliminate/mitigate device operation disruption. Hugely time consuming to verify and validate all of the corrective measures...……..)
From the little I remember, our ESD guys subscribed to ESD journals and went to conferences on the subject, and met with people from all manner of industries, that starting in the 1990s, were hit with the cursed interaction of ESD with the then new fangled microprocessor based systems just then coming to market. And our guys made clear that all manner of responsible companies had come to the realization that to remain viable, that they had to come to terms with ESD and be able to bring ESD hardened products to market. The lesson here, is that if an analogous set of market forces had come to bear on Shopbot, they would have had to hire to big brains like we had, and they would have had to harden the Shopbot product line against ESD.
But perhaps the consumers of Shopbots are simply too disorganized, and willing to accept their ESD problems as being their own fault. Based upon what I saw in my work, the matter of ending the Shopbot ESD induced communication instabilities may well be corrected by ESD experts, hardening what Shopbot offers, instead of waiting for Shopbot to come out with some entirely new platform...… (But again, such an effort would not be a trivial undertaking...)
(And that raises the corollary concern...…. What IF Shopbot comes out with a new platform, and then we find out that it too has not been ESD hardened? Just being new, and being free from USB doesn't mean the ESD susceptibility will magically disappear..... We had our ESD issues, without having any USB ports!)
I didn't mean to ramble, and I am no expert in this. But I know enough to say ESD can't be fixed by just tossing a few ground wires here and there, and crossing your fingers...…….. Better luck with a rabbit's foot...… I would rather hope that Shopbot would hire a big-brained ESD expert to harden what they have...… Then that guy can work to make the new system be hardened against ESD..... Chuck