A double wall wouldn't really help here, because the issue is the heat simply conducts through the chassis where the partition meets the rear, then to the side panels. Aluminum is very good at this, and unfortunately it doesn't serve us well here. I do tend to agree with your other points about the market appeal for the case, however.So, the SteamBox design is dead? Well, that's a bummer, but I'm not too surprised, not so much because of the engineerng challenges which I'm sure you could solve (like switch to steel for the internals and design the upper half of the case to have a "double wall" between the GPU and the HDDs)
Sure. That specific layout has some things I'm not such a fan of though, like the very limited watercooling support. It's also quite wide, and I tend to prefer taller and narrower vs. short and squat.I would love to see a contribution to the uATX-market. The market for uATX-cases that are not just small midi-towers severely underrepresented. Do you remember your remake of the Sugo SG10?
This is something I'd like to do as well, and I've actually done more than a few concepts along those lines. It's a real challenge to decide what aspects or features to include, and which to omit, because everything is a tradeoff. Just as an example, top vents are not ideal either from a noise or dust control perspective, but they're an ideal place for a radiator to exhaust. Of course that has implications for the size as well, and you can't easily use the space for anything else, so it ends up being wasted space if not used for a radiator.I still think it would be exciting to see a balanced and elegantly designed mid-size mini-itx case with silence and possibly water cooling in mind.