[f1shy]

> they suggest ROS as a robust industry-ready software, which absolutely hasn't been my experience

Also BY FAR not my experience.

Personally I see ROS as a cool thing for prototyping and research, but I see it certainly not as a serious solution for industry.

> This is due to the horrible build system, odd choice of defaults, instability under constrained resources, and how it inserts itself into everything.

This is an excellent short description of the main pain topics. I would add, that the need to work with 5 different languages (YAML, XML, MSG, CMAKE and C and/or Python) from scratch, makes it difficult for SME that are not software people to be productive in short time.