I agree with you. Right now with Flight Hub 2, we have an economic and game changing ability to have advanced ops at a low cost. We will be attempting to do a DFR COA very soon and we are lucky that our air space is uncomplicated.
I see you did some research on the SIRAS. I was led to Coretronics from the DOC on the SIRAS for Remote ID and was shocked when I saw they took an interesting platform and made it uninteresting. Also that you cannot charge the controller while using it and lacking a swappable battery was really a turnoff on the SIRAS for our organization. The SIRAS is more a competitor for the Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced and the
Evo 2 640/Dual in Public Safety applications.
I don't have time to link it, but the Dobo guy on Youtube brought it up. The new proposed law (whether it has or will have traction is speculation) is even scarier than the previous attempts. It is basically saying that in the future if you apply for a Federal grant (Not just to buy a drone, but any federal grant such as for AFG, SAFER) and you own and operate a covered sUAS you would need a waiver process to receive the grant. We use SAFER and/or AFG almost annually so this is a very scary point for us. If we had to choose a DJI drone or the hiring of firefighters or the purchase of capitol expense type equipment to include up to apparatus the choice is a grounded DJI drone.
If you don't mind me asking, what Skydio did you test? I am hoping that the X10 fixes alot of past issues such as limited range, extra money to unlock the useful capabilities and other problems. We also use our drones to support traditional tasks and currently are mapping our beaches to "survey grade" and doing sand loss volume calculations. We need an RTK drone to make this feasible and the X10 is the first solution Skydio has that may be able to integrate RTK/PPK into mapping, but it still remains to be seen if their optional RTK module is for just positioning or if it tags the images. Right now the
Evo 2 RTK/Enterprise and Mavic 3E are some of the few options to easily RTK/PPK map under $5K with a reasonably large CMOS sensor and easy, proven workflows. The ability to not have to use GCPs on the beach where they are picked up or moved by the curious or taken by other people who think they are trash is the only reason we can map our beaches with the available manpower.