The high speed communications guys do.
Most of the rest of the industry is just too cheap to use anything other then the simple opamp/pass transistor combo. Ie they don't like paying for opamps that can have inputs that can swing rail to rail etc Besides, most people coming out of EE school today are taught mainly digital , not analog and the idea of using a Howland current pump as a VCCS ie voltage controlled current source is in the Burr Brown etc app notes, not the basic EE textbooks.
Basic electrical engineering texts are rarely good at showing how to do applied electronics.
And EE professors are rarely interested in analog, and thus are unlikely to want student labs covering it. Thus only after a few years of field experience do you get good analog EEs. And good analog EEs are usually too highly sought after to be messing with laser drivers. Unless you send your kid to MIT, Perdue, Carnegie, Case, or similar schools, where learning this stuff is part of the culture and tradition.
Bill, at his skill level, could be a gazillionaire designing chips, / but he likes to run his own company. For those of us who work with lasers, be glad he chooses this sacrifice and that he is happy doing it!
Then you get the Dr Lava's, Uncle Worms, and the guys like me, who are forced to learn analog in order to do our jobs, as rarely in the research business does a off the shelf hardware exist for what you want to do.
If you think ESD is spooky , wait till you try RF above 2 ghz. Despite my sarcasm in the previous post, I too want some lasorbs, and they cannot come soon enough.
I might flip one on some test gear for a lark, in order better understand the device, but I need the things ASAP to go into something being prototyped for "our" boys and girls in the "stans" and have enough other development projects right now.
I also suspect it might be useful in " impulse" generation, for another area of my interests.
Steve