Formulators don't have an infinite number of tools with which to process their products - just an unlimited number of ways to use them.
In the coatings industry, market and product success often have as much to do with processing strategy as with chemistry. Just ask the leading makers of wood sealants, car coatings, and ink-jet printer ink. Materials simply would not be penetrating enough, hard enough or fine enough without the correct processing strategy. That's why many coatings manufacturers regard materials processing just as they do their chemical formulas - as trade secrets. In fact, chemical discovery and materials processing discovery have a lot in common. Both often involve concentrated amounts of trial and error using known principles that were arrived at through years of experience. Researchers usually start with what worked in the past and then go from there. Yet there is one thing that is significantly different. In chemical research, the experimenter has virtually an unlimited number of raw materials with which to work, starting with the 109 elements in the periodic table.
However, in materials processing, there are only seven equipment types from which almost every synthetic material ever created can be manufactured. Differences occur not just in the choice of equipment type, but also in the processing time, media used, temperature, processing speed and several other key variables (although, again, the total number of variables is very small, compared to the number of potential compounds that could be involved). What makes the discovery process complex is not the number of tools or processing variables so much as the variety of ways tools and processing variables can be combined to create unique processes. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the guidelines for making these choices are fairly limited in number.