I think people see car companies as a huge monolith with nearly limitless resources. I can see where this comes from, but those resources are split into silos, and those silos have limited capacity. Especially for companies like Subaru, which is actually pretty small comparatively. They may have done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the investment was not worth the money they get from selling those option packages.
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On a broader level, I think right to repair can be perceived as a feature, but many executives have a default negative stance on openness.
I think of it like the GM LS engine. If you're at all familiar with car modification, you've heard of the LS Swap - people changing the engine that came with their car for a larger, more powerful, more versatile GM V8 engine. The LS swap ecosystem grew because the engines were relatively cheap, relatively easy to work on, and relatively reliable (your mileage may vary). Imagine if GM executives had tried to lock down the engine swap environment.
John Deere has actually been saying this (that they're working on it as fast as they can and it will be ready any day now) as they stall for years and refuse to actually make their software available to purchasers, even though the software itself actually already exists, since dealers have it, and they could literally just hand people copies with zero additional work.
I've been thinking about assumptions so deep you don't even realize they are assumptions. If an organization assumes a dealership model, and works that way for 50 years, all sorts of decisions are made that make it hard to go direct. People joining the org naturally go along, after a while they just don't think about alternatives.
It's REALLY hard to hold ideas that don't make sense in your head; you ask your leadership "Why do we do this" and you come to some conclusion based on what they say, but it's resolved. Like untying a knot, you have to leave a lot of loose ends unresolved if you want to change deep assumptions, and that is not mentally rewarding for most people.
Should you get the source code to all software running on it, along with all the relevant documentation and a right to modify it as you see fit? Without that, it's not really full control.
Also that the devices' uses should be up to their owners, not their manufacturers. Devices are tools, not services.
I haven't been keeping up with the "Right to Repair" movement as close as I should have, I'm afraid, and I'm not sure how far down the rabbit hole it goes. Does it drop down so far as to touch the software that runs the machine systems on these, or is it purely mechanical?
EDIT: At this point in my life I should be able to spell =(
Yeah, but you also don't have the "right" to run your device on shared public spaces with your modifications that make it substantially more dangerous to other users of the same public space.
A reasonable compromise would be to require any modifications to be disclosed at registration, but with a policy of approving them by default unless there is a good, evidence-based reason to think that they pose a significant risk.
At least if they did, you could build one with 100% aftermarket pieces.
Of course, this doesn't really address the issue of people buying cars from out of state. But who knows, maybe we'll see "Massachusetts Cars" be a thing in the Subaru world for their lack of broken factory features.
Also, "who cares it's just one small state in one country" is not a very nice thing for a company to express either.
Either way it's a bit of a middle finger to the affected customers IMO.
It feels terrible to do but there isn’t much choice.