The point of engineering is to make something that’s economically viable, not to slap together something that works. Making something that works is easy, making something that works and can be sold at scale is hard.

That's not engineering, that's industry. It's important to distinguish the two.

Engineering only exists within industry. Everything else is a hobby.

That's simply not true. Engineering can exist outside industry. "Stuff costs money" is not a governing aspect of these kinds of things.

FOSS is the obvious counterexample to your absurdly firm stance, but so are many artistic pursuits that use engineering techniques and principles, etc.

Industry includes FOSS and artistic endeavors, anything that’s done professionally.

My intent was to exclude research efforts, which is fundamentally different from engineering, which is a practical concern and not a “get it to just work” concern.

That's an interesting question, the question of whether engineering per se is strictly pragmatic. I personally think drawing a hard line between research and engineering is a misstep and relies too heavily on a bureaucratic kind of metaphysics.

If it would be easy there would already be a car costing a few million that few can afford but that has solved AD. But there isn't.

There is no market for such a thing. At that price point, you get a personal chauffeur. That’s what rich people do and he can do stuff that a self driving system never can.

And the rich people who don't want a chauffeur like driving the car. They will buy a $10M car no problem, but they want driving that car to be fun because that's what they were paying for. They don't want you to make the driving more automatic and less interesting.