There are many reasons for different hydraulic cylinder designs. There is no software that I know of that will evaluate how to design hydraulic cylinders. The learning curve of designing cylinders will be hard to justify if you can purchase what you need from some one who already designs and manufactures them.
We build heavy duty cylinders for industrial, forestry and construction, but if an off shelf cylinder will work, we purchase them because our cost to manufacture them is more. If a cylinder lasts less than a year or 2,000 hours then we look at the application, the cause of failure, and see if one of our standard designs will work. We have a US patent on a high pressure piston seal developed for working pressures of 7,000 psi and will take spikes to 20,000 psi, for logging grapples, clam buckets, and thumbs for excavators. The design and testing of the grapple and clam bucket cylinder took several years and several iterations before success. The thumb cylinder test machine cost a lot, it had a 14” bore cylinder to apply work induced loads, up to 460,000 lbs so we could identify what caused certain failures.
If you have no choice but to design and manufacture cylinders, good luck.