it is, however Millions of people operate normal saws everyday with out cutting their figures off, and contrary to popular belief on here Safety does have a cost narrative to it. SawStop over values their tech for many people, which is why other saws continue to outsell their saw because people buying the saws value other things more than the safety enhancements the SawStop technology brings
It has nothing to do with being an "Outsider" and everything to do with SawStops inventor placing and outsized value on the technology.
The manufacturers respond to consumer demand, and many consumers would refuse to pay the extra money (for some saws it would have amounted to several hundred dollars more retail price) for the technology
Perhaps at some point, shops that only use blade-stop safety saws would recoup that cost on lower employee health insurance premiums?
Licensing the technology does not mean it must be put into all models of saw! You don't have to buy the heated seats and built-in backseat entertainment center when you buy a car, either.
Saw Stop is actively engaged, and has been for more than 10 years, in trying to get the government to mandate their technology to be in all models of saw
Is 10% reasonable? Too much or too little? How much value should be captured by the consumers that wear the belts? How much by the manufacturers that licensed them voluntarily? How much from compulsory installations? How much value should be captured by unlicensed installations?
Should the value of raised speed limits count, or just the direct impact of reduced collision injury severity?
Are we discounting the possibility that the patent licensing fee demanded by the saw-stopping inventor was actually reasonable in the US, thanks to hyperinflated medical costs, and the saw manufacturers were basing their decisions on international sales in countries with sane healthcare systems?
It isn't just that they wouldn't pay the license, it's also that they didn't develop the safety tech themselves in the first place. They presumably applied the Fight Club formula, to determine that the company's liability when people slice fingers off with one of their saws was not enough to justify the cost of actually doing anything about it (beyond writing into the operator's manual "let's don't cut any fingers off, mmmkay?").
If one of the incumbents had invented it, the others would have licensed or counter-patented incremental improvements and cross-licensed, recognizing it as a competitive threat.
But since an outsider patented it, that's a minor threat. What can a little guy do against a 100-year tool brand? And if he has to enforce, that means they're not playing by the rules, which are to pay the inventor's license, or wait until the patent expires.
Why are severed fingers part of anyone's business model?