I think you’re underestimating the rate of change in the technology and cost space along every one of these dimensions. Your assessment was true 5 years ago, isn’t true now, and will seem anachronistic in another 5.
It goes both ways. Just half a century years ago plenty of people were convinced we'd be having flying cars by now, projecting the speed of progress in one particular area forward. It doesn't work like that, progress in any given area is S-shaped, not exponential.
It's even worse when processes are adversarial. Where are the TB2s in Ukraine? Are you aware that FPV drones seem to have less than 10% success ratio nowadays?
The problem with flying cars is the physics at that time wasn’t conceivable (but is now it’s just I’m practically useless). The technology exists to do everything discussed by a DIY effort. It’s not about some quantum leap in ability. It’s about scale, cost reduction, and improvement of existing tooling and tying it all together. Which militaries world wide are -already- doing.
A 10% success ratio when the munition costs an order or two magnitude less is a winning proposition. The key isn’t each drone being successful it’s about launching 100,000 drones at once and being unstoppable en masse
This is already theoretically possible with multiple teams using current technology. Intel has been doing these drone light shows for a while now, and here's a video from 2 years ago with only 1000 drones.
I wonder if the person cuing the launch at the beginning of the video understands what "drop[ping] the hammer" is a reference to. Maybe this is a case of unintentional Chekhov's gun?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun
There's a whole playlist of these on Intel's YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAlVweZ4dqQ&list=PLk2sjg_-F-...
Even more Intel drone videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk2sjg_-F-MftRXx0mAnA...
Oh yeah, they also have another video, where they break their own record for their Guinness world record show with 2018 drones. That's the number of drones and the year they did it in. That's already 5 years+ ago. They let slip that their drone coordination software was literally designed to control "limitless amount of drones" and it's only using a single PC for coordination.
I agree with everything you've said, in case it wasn't clear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwQ31-vSgfs&list=PLk2sjg_-F-...
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/142/i...
It's not a winning proposition when you take into account that those FPV launches require teams of dozens of people to support, and that good old artillery is both cheaper, scarier (=more suppressive), and more effective.
Launch 100,000 drones against what target? How do you find the target? How do you get to it without getting detected and destroyed? Where do you launch from, what's your launch platform, and is it survivable (if you just plan to bring trucks to the front line, they'll just get blown up pre launch)? How do you deal with high power directed microwave, lasers, or just basic AA shells filling the air with shrapnel for peanuts? How do you coordinate the attack, especially under EW, without saturating all bandwidth available way before you reach 100,000?
You're severely underestimating the challenges and how much it costs to solve them. There are multiple reasons why torpedo boats never worked against competent navies, despite being theoretically much cheaper than battleships or modern destroyers; many of those reasons still apply to those ideas about cheap drones.
In the end it might very much be cheaper and more effective to use a good old JASSM-ER.