HIV is a different animal from most viruses since it targets the immune cells, the very thing that allows vaccines to work, so I imagine its a lot more complicated than other vaccines to develop.
The HIV vaccine mutates quickly enough that the host never develops immunity themselves, which makes triggering immunity with a vaccine very difficult.
Having spent some time at a Fortune 500 company I cannot imagine a day where someone voluntarily creates a plan to eliminate billions of dollars of sales in monthly doses of medicine in exchange for a single or double dose per patient product. Corporations just don't think like that. Some might say it's even illegal for them to value the patients over the shareholders under current regulations.
I take your point on the complexity of HIV. However there are creative strategies that can be used like targeting surface proteins (?) perhaps. There are a great many intelligent people in the field. I have dim memories of work showing promise in the early years of the disease. It seems to have gone silent after the introduction of the drug cocktail approach. Coincidence? Perhaps...
This is generally reason enough for companies to do what they will, consequences be damned.
The OPs conspiracies don’t hold any water to reality.
The reason for drug prices are randomly spiking in the US (for a small minority of drugs lucky enough to be in FDA backlogs) is mostly unrelated to the R&D side: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d...
I'm sorry but there isn't a global conspiracy to stop development of an HIV vaccine. Much of what big pharma does is incredibly cyncial and deserves scrutiny, but even viewing it within that lens, there is a clear business case here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...