If you want a simple and cheap tractor, you can find a Farmall from like 40 years ago and restore it easily for like a grand or two (at least my friends dad was still doing this in 2008).
Typically whenever a once competitive firm becomes a lazy monopolist, at some point others want to break in and get a piece of the profit pie. It could happen someday.
Another aspect of what we are experiencing here I think is essentially a multi-level/nested con job that uses that artificial and perception of complexity to extract ever higher and compounding levels of what what are essentially rents.
The established industry players are banking on the high barrier to entry (heavy machinery production) and brand recognition (Runs like a Deere) to con the whole sector, and therefore extract wealth from the whole of society trying to feed itself.
Please feel free to challenge my perspective.
I suspect that it will take some other innovation to make this worthwhile to fund. Right to repair is not innovation, its just a single feature change, so nobody cares to solve it. It generates complaints, but probably doesn't hurt sales.
At some point, maybe electrification will be that innovation. Or maybe form factor? but, JD is not ignoring product development, they just have expensive spare parts.
A data point I never see is what JD reliability is like. Toyota has expensive spare parts compared to several of their competitors, but they are also very reliable. If JD's DRMs and expensive parts are concomitant with reliable tractors, then maybe this issue is really just interesting to techno libertarians and not actual farmers? I don't have any sense for the size of the JD repair market.
I've come across the term "confusopoly":
From a high level, this doesn't seem a whole lot different than the scan tools needed to diagnose new cars. Some of which are vendor-locked on cars, but at minimum, there are OBDII codes and scanners available to consumers. It's the more marque-specific scan tools that aren't as readily available (but even then, I believe indy service shops can buy/license them, but it's very expensive).
He has to call out someone to show him how to drive it and has no idea how to get it hitched. All coming from a man who has driven more cars of different types than probably anyone on the planet. Granted, it is a comedy, buy I think if you watch the first episode, you'll get the idea as I did.
The problem is, as in many other domains, a combination of opportunity cost and network effect.
Getting in the commercial farming game is going to be expensive as hell and gruelling as you try to get a foothold, and unlike, say, a car, your average farmer has a ton of equipment from the same brand which works together, and the more time passes the harder it becomes to interop (though I guess at least in farming you don't have too many patented hitches or PTOs these days?)
Not to mention in farming you really need to have a network on the ball for parts and repairs, if you fuck up a farmer's season by leaving them stranded for a week they're not going to be happy campers.
Both of these would be serious issues for operating a modern, large scale farming operation.
Oh, and most GPS steering systems don't come with the tractor, and some types of systems are retrofitted onto any tractor with a steering wheel.
However for large-scale agriculture where your tractor is pulling high-end machinery you need something very powerful and sophisticated. JD leads this market, and is a significant player in the mid-range also.