Sounds like they could have used you on that team. Bad luck, but it at least you can walk away proud knowing it was not an issue with your technical skills. :)

Cut-through is applicable in a minority of scenarios which are sometimes common. The majority of switches, especially the ones that support any advanced features at all, can't use it. Even when you can use it, you still can't use it all the time because of port conflicts.

As far as advanced features go, even adding and removing VLAN tags is a headache in a cut-through switch.

You can join multiple Tiny Tapeout tiles (grid squares) together to form bigger projects, which is what I did here. It's actually one of the bigger 4 grid projects.

Also how much you can fit really depends on the node the shuttle is targeting. So I was in luck that this was on Global Foundries 180nm as you can cram in a lot for flip-flops onto a single tile compared with Skywater 130nm. On the other hand the gates are much slower than on Skywater 130nm.

Hopefully both programs will be around for a while, so if you are still interested when you have more time you can join the shuttle then.