I agree that DJI is a robotics company, and as somebody who has been keeping a close eye on the consumer drone market, it seems they are practically impossible to compete with.
By now, DJI has more than a thousand of employees and at least a decade of experience in this area.
current expenses are at about £100 for the frame, motors, ESC, and flight controller, but I already own a transmitter and receiver that I'm reusing, so add another £100 minimum for that (probably more tbh). Then factor in that so far I've not brought the LiPo batteries or chargers, so add another £50. Then factor in I'm not putting any cameras on it yet, so add another £100 for a fpv camera, 5ghz transmitter and receiver. And the spark does more than that would provide, to match the spark you'd also need to add a second HD camera, and gimbal, so maybe another £100 if you buy low cost parts (I'm not currently seeing any diy parts that can do what the spark does I.e live view and recorded HD video with one camera, hence the two cameras needed). So that's £450 now.
And then consider that the spark comes with a smart phone app, GPS, and a bunch of nifty easy to use features that are way ahead of what clean flight/betaflight open source controller software currently does.
Perhaps the balances of the economics are different for the more expensive DJI drones, but to me the spark seems very well priced for what it does. I wouldn't be building one myself if I wasn't at least as much interested in the fun of the project than the final result.
1: Build -> 2: Fly -> 3: Crash (goto 1)
1: Buy -> 2: Fly -> 3: Crash (goto 1)
4: -> Give to someone else to repair...Around the end of last year I decided that I needed to replace a couple of very venerable DIY Windows boxes I had for gaming and other purposes. I started pricing out CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, and so forth and I ended up just buying a big Alienware laptop. It fit into my environment better, was certainly fast enough, didn't cost much more, and was just less hassle.
I've spent many, many hours building PCs but I was sort of "been there done that" about doing it again.