[smoldesu]

That first quote is right on-the-money, in my experience with competitive FRC and automation. It's extremely easy to work with a limited set of parameters like a cardboard box; you can easily estimate object volume and bounding-box collision in software. Making a robot that manipulates millions of Amazon products is a suicide mission by comparison; especially if you expect it to behave consistently.

Computer vision, AI and inverse kinematics have all come a long ways in the past few years. That being said, it's still easier by an order of magnitude to design the box-pushing robot.