That's an insightful experience, thank you for sharing. To give a counter-counter point, in my experience working with LIDAR (terrestrial in my case, not airborne) there's a wealth of tools that claim to process large amounts of unstructured pointcloud data and make all kinds of fancy visualizations and 3d models (Pix4D comes to my mind). The "catch" was often to find high quality data to feed these tools (other than the sample data provided by them). I'm convinced that having high-quality proprietary data is the moat the investors are looking for, not the algorithms. After all, universities are cranking improved algorithms all the time for free.