But the tl;dr is that building prototypes is pricey, and the cost should definitely come down once the community moves from prototyping to mass-producing robots.
Hello Robots (the company behind the Stretch robot we're using) is also trying to bootstrap and build a sustainable product rather than blitzscaling and burning out fast [0, 1, 2] for which I respect them a lot. It's all too common of a story in robot world where have a great company showing lots of promise and then a year or two later they shut down after burning through investor money. I don't want to see it repeat.
I'm no marketing expert. But I'd think the majority of those who have an extra $20k to splash on a home robot are not the type of people who want to buy a prototype for hacking.
Maybe not the majority, but I think that "early engineers at every Internet startup ever who made it big and want to tinker with a house robot" might be a big enough market to sell a couple of these things. These don't need to be in everyone last person's hands, like smartphones are, in order to be a success.
Plus, if you want to use the stereotype that rich people who can drop $20k on random crap don't do things for themselves, why wouldn't the rich person's tech team buy one on their employers dime?
I am glad you mentioned automobiles! They are among the most heavily engineered everyday product that we use every day, and this engineering and cost optimization has been going on for close to a hundred years now. So, I would read this same statement as "$20k and 100 years of engineering gets us a lot" rather than "$20k gets us a lot". I am hoping better engineering and the wonders of modern supply chains will get us a home robot at 1/10th of the current price when the time is right.
What are the options to do similar manipulations for lower cost on a robotic unit?