Good Rebuttal: I was around back in those days and that's not really a similar comparison... labor market, etc were more critical variables. American Manufacturing was first... we took it too Japan to make it cheaper; taught, coached, and built their auto enterprise. If looking for a auto example, kinda-sorta.... in a crude way: AM General and the HMMWV (Humvee) was a Govt only focused Company that had it's day... then decayed, sold and decayed again, sold, tried public and decayed again. The '60's Foreign Car market... Japan low grade got attention for price but certainly not quality, durability or safety and Japan didn't have control of the USA market... other way around. Nobody argued a Datsun was a quality car with more potential than a Chevy... Nobody felt the Datsun was even a Good Car (Loved my 240Z), like any Japan cars their best trait was Rust... they were just dirt cheap! Incomparison the Big 3 Dogs of USA... their 20-50's could sit in water for years and still have more steel in the body. Jump forward to 90's... Asian Companies succeeded due to many reasons... fresh design ideas weren't the primary, it was more business practice of economics.
ON the sUAV Forums... actually it shows loged-in and guests for total count. Plus the point is what... it's still less than 20 on avg and Mavic Forum avg 400... low 200 Logged in, up to 2000 at a time.
No question the S2 is great, Skydio is attempting to be successful... but visualize DJI for a moment creating a new company: "DJI USA" or "Superior Drone", transferring a few 1000 employees over to USA, and on their Owned land build a living society, setup manufacturing of close identical parts except molded, punched, cut, polished and soldered & created in USA. The DJI USA company is now competitive and easily within the regulations of Govt. Their price point I'm confident would be much lower than Other USA based companies. They could mimic their designs within USA production and get past a new company growth in short fashion. That may be a route that is being constructed currently.
No one actually "using" the DJI products within the Govt wanted to give up their inventory (actually they don't have to yet, it's a life cycle event) they were directed by a mandate to begin purchase agreements with other companies. Many have argued the new policy siting: price, technology, and software programing as some of the reasons to maintain DJI inventory.
