This is a good, well thought out point that I 60% disagree with (respectfully, of course). I think you're absolutely accurate in describing how robotics is today, and you're definitely partially correct about how it will remain, but I think you're biasing towards thinking robotics (as a field) is exceptional to the types of progress that have happened in software.

To unfairly simplify that assertion, it reminds me of a founder who once told me that "robotics will never be as easy as software. It's just harder and will always be so."

I don't know if I think each autonomy company needs to figure out vehicle dynamics any more than I think each company needs to figure out their cloud infrastructure. At a certain scale (and amount of success) you will certainly need smart people thinking about it, but you can get pretty far on a 90% standard AWS instance. Things like wheel slippage are challenging, but their challenging in similar ways across vehicle types (but different from other tasks you need to work on when building that higher level autonomy).

Similarly, if you assume you can safely stop when there's danger, there are a relatively finite number of environmental conditions you should operate in - which we can build, maintain, and improve "once" as opposed to making every mining OEM or Ag autonomy shop build from scratch. In time, there might be certain portions of this stack that you can swap out with your own (or with some other company that's better at seeing in the fog, for example); but I fundamentally don't believe that every robotics company needs to solve all of these hard problems well on their own for every application.

Re:Sim - for paying customers we are putting their specific vehicle (and sometimes their environment) as a part of the offering. We're also using sim to help figure out how to position sensors (which will be another cool thing that we want to show at some point).