Like any other magnet-related thread, the undergrads come out of the woodwork to share their expertise with the world. I'll start compiling a list of my favorite, highly educational comments below:

I don't think the rpm would have an impact

Yeah man, alternating magnetic fields at high RPMs will have no effect on the magnet. That Faraday Lenz dude, or whatever his name was, was a total amateur.

I think torque wont be an issue if you could combine these gears and amplify them with electricity

... This guy gets it. Amplify those Amperian currents with an electromagnet to get a super magnet on steroids! Coercivity also skyrockets with magnetization, as well all know, so that's pretty much infinite torque right there.

Ferromagnetic metals (IE iron, nickel, cobalt) have many separate magnetic domains. These are regions within the metal where a bunch of electrons are aligned a certain way. When the metal is magnetized all these domains align.

Yep, that's it. Align those domains and ya have a magnet!

A way to demagnetize a magnet is to give it a sharp whack on a hard surface

I see this person also uses the same sources that I do in regards to magnets- papers published in the 1700s and /r/AskScience.

Well, the simple answer is that there is a force called the electromagnetic force. It's one of the four forces in nature. You're probably more familiar with the force of gravity

The long answer as to why there is an electromagnetic force is... No one knows... Some people think there is a relationship between the 2 nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force and those 3 seem very different than gravity; however for everything to be mathematically perfect you would want to link all 4 together somehow. It has yet to be done though.

Yep, this person has it. Magnets work through the electromagnetic force. Forget about stupid details like exchange interaction, magnetocrystalline anisotropy, magnetostatic energies, exchange coupling, microstructure, etc., just say electromagnetic force or maybe Amperian currents and call it a day.

ELI5 magnetism:

Each atom in a traditional magnet has the same directional spin, this creates the field which causes it to be attracted to other objects (think of a pool ball hugging a cushion, with a little side spin). Pretty much you can only give an entire object a polarity (direction of spin) So this is novel in the fact that a single object can have a large amount of poles, better still you can arrange them how you like. This creates feedback in the waves that can be used to make a variety of magnetic effects.

I honestly don't even know where to start.

Maybe I'm not getting it, but it seems like it's essentially a bunch of smaller magnets oriented either N or S

Actually, friend, you get it just fine. If you know how a hard drive stores information, you may be quite fucking familiar with what this magical "programmable" magnet is

And last but not least, what magnet thread would be complete without a quote from Feynman?! Pretty sure that gives you Expert flair in /r/AskScience.

However, I'm really, really disappointed no one has showed up to tell everyone how normal magnets are actually made. Like, does no one want to talk about the process of cooling the magnets down in a magnetic field to align the domains?