Sometimes it's just ... hard. Apply some thought maybe before blindly parroting "profit!"
Reporter: "Why is it hard to cure cancer?". Crowd: "Would there be enough of a financial incentive to do so? Seems like a prime startup opportunity!"
Reporter: "Why is it hard to end World poverty?". Crowd: "Would there be enough of a financial incentive to do so? Seems like a prime startup opportunity!"
Reporter: "Why is it hard to build a warp engine?". Crowd: "Would there be enough of a financial incentive to do so? Seems like a prime startup opportunity!"
Reporter: "Why is it hard to wipe your ass using the left hand?". Crowd: "Would there be enough of a financial incentive to do so? Seems like a prime startup opportunity!"
You get the idea...
What you want to optimize for is the money amount that you make at some quantile of the probablity distribution of the profits; say, the profits that are guaranteed in the best, say, 3 %, 5 %, 10 % or even 20 % of all possible outcomes. With a probablity of 97 % (if you choose the best 3 % of the outcomes), you won't make sufficient money if you attempt to cure cancer to be worth the risk, so the financial incentive is not there.
TLDR: Financial incentives do matter, but work differently from how many people think that they are structured.
When researchers want to publish a paper, are they going to pay extra money for extra difficulty in publishing their paper? No, they'll just use whatever toy environment is free or already established and get that paper published!
Put another way,if I were trying to do a start up in this space I'd spend 50% of my budget on marketing 25% on a third world data labelling sweatshop, 20% on data pipeline engineering and 5% on sexy ml stuff.