It has nothing to do with attention or skill. Food forests are simply bad businesses. If they weren't, we would see adoption pretty quickly. Idealism only takes you so far, in the end people need to make a living.
I don’t know if they’d be viable vs non-subsidized farms either but in the US it is really hard to have a conversation about farm profitability without looking at how the government puts their finger on the scales.
At one time there were a lot more subsidies, but not anymore.
https://www.cftc.gov/Agriculture
Not fitting into the norm in this case costs more than it would for other innovations.
Where food forests win, is where people don't want mono-culture food products, and prefer to grow - and eat - locally.
Of course, if you've never stepped off the grid, you can't look at it, critically. If you have, you may wonder why you ever lived on it, in the first place.
We'd all be much, much healthier if we could eat locally, and grow our own foods - in whatever manner is feasible - instead of burning oil to do it.
If doing farming differently would certainly net more, they would do it. So I take there is some component that is forgotten. Be it scaling, labour input or available market for higher priced products.
https://agendagotsch.com/en/large-scale-syntropic-farming-re...
World's most important sources of calories: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-important-staple-fo...
They probably don't see farming as being like capitalism because farming is, with some exceptions, mostly socialist in nature – the workers own the means of production.
> They will aim to make as much profit with resources they have available.
That is certainly true, although not a feature of capitalism. Wanting something in return for offering something to another transcends capital ownership structures.
Maintaining ones own - or community - garden is a fantastic way to just improve the quality of your own life, and the life of others around you.
That's a different kind of profit.