I think what you wrote makes sense as a way of maximising the chances of producing a viable product. I suppose there aren't any guarantees that it will be competitive with bog-standard computers, but it might be a reasonable gamble.
> maximising the chances of producing a viable product
That's the goal. The annealing QPU is a co-processor, like your GPU, like vector processors, or a DSP, etc. It doesn't need to compete with classical compute on the things classical compute is good at; it needs to compete on the things classical compute is bad at, or at the very least, bad at without throwing massive piles of money at it. There is a crossover point for optimization problems where we will be able to show a price/performance advantage over classical compute, which we term Quantum Advantage (vs. the more divisive term of Quantum Supremacy).
The trick at this point is formulating problems in such a way as to be something you can run on our hardware, which still requires a deep mathematical skillset. This is something we're building on... perhaps pay attention to our Qubits conference coming up next week - https://www.qubits.com/ - there should be some interesting announcements!