But the tl;dr is that building prototypes is pricey, and the cost should definitely come down once the community moves from prototyping to mass-producing robots.
Hello Robots (the company behind the Stretch robot we're using) is also trying to bootstrap and build a sustainable product rather than blitzscaling and burning out fast [0, 1, 2] for which I respect them a lot. It's all too common of a story in robot world where have a great company showing lots of promise and then a year or two later they shut down after burning through investor money. I don't want to see it repeat.
I'm no marketing expert. But I'd think the majority of those who have an extra $20k to splash on a home robot are not the type of people who want to buy a prototype for hacking.
Maybe not the majority, but I think that "early engineers at every Internet startup ever who made it big and want to tinker with a house robot" might be a big enough market to sell a couple of these things. These don't need to be in everyone last person's hands, like smartphones are, in order to be a success.
Plus, if you want to use the stereotype that rich people who can drop $20k on random crap don't do things for themselves, why wouldn't the rich person's tech team buy one on their employers dime?