They did a pretty good job on hardware design. Everything seems to be done properly. I actually think those engineers have much harder life than for example those in Agilent or Tek, because they are pretty much limited to industry standard parts. I guess if that was an Agilent you would see at least OP07 or some expensive, high-spec opamps from LT or AD or even some ASIC (nice to have an in-house ASIC fab, right? O0). Agilent/Tek doesn't care, potential customer is prepared to pay a shitload of dollars for the device. I bet it took those Atten guys quite a lot of time to design this, according to "on time, on budget, working... Pick two" rule.
I think that those opamp/dac/msp430 boards may have been actually hand soldered. In such design you typically find a broad range of different component values, and maybe the cheap-ass assembly house had only a very old pick and place equipment with very limited number of feeders. And it's much harder to overheat resistor or cap than opamp or microcontroller. So they probably assembled ICs on pick and place and then got some minimum wage (in chinese meaning) workers to hand solder the rest. That would explain difference in soldering quality between ICs and passives.
MSP430F2013 is a very nice chip. I have used it before for temperature readout and stabilisation. Internal reference is quite good too. On the other hand clocking setup is pain in the ass, as it has like 6 different clock signals for all sorts of power saving schemes.