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openDogv3 is a really impressive project, but it's also optimized for low-cost and weight. There are a lot of better options out there than 8308s and a 3d-printed gearbox at the enthusiast or hobbyist level; they just blow out the rest of your budget out of the water and dramatically increase cost-of-entry.
That said, while the gap isn't as huge as you're suggesting, it's still pretty big. More efficient artificial approaches usually work by optimizing for entirely different purposes or environments.
I've been thinking today how good (smaller, lighter, more efficient) opendog would become if they just replaced all 3D-printed nonsense with CNC-machined or stamped metal and injection-molded polymers (and of course revamped electronics). Maybe it'd really be on par with Spot then, or (with added sensors, brains etc.) wipe the floor with Chinese knock-off dogs.
But that requires scale. I really hope somebody helps here: we need some sort of Stability for robotics.
If we don't optimize for low cost, at current costs those machines will be completely non-competitive.
What projects do you have in mind?
Yeah, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit available for improvements; even simple drill-press and 6061 aluminum could do a lot. But the toolchains for those processes are much more complicated and the processes themselves much messier, so it's not really in consideration. And, conversely, there's a lot of potential spaces for... more improvizational materials, where people are willing to design around them.
Scale is part of the problem, but you don't need that much scale. The FIRST FRC environment has a ton of devices being sold on scales of hundreds or low thousands that involve a lot of custom metal parts, and while they're not always good, they're definitely extant and productive. Part of that reflects the tax- and labor-advantaged nature of a situations where most customers and some sellers are non-profits or subsidiaries of non-profits, but that's ultimately a political choice: there's no that must favor FRC or Vex but not more productive matters.
The deeper issues... I think the big one is that there's simultaneously a big desire to build everything from 'scratch', but also to see some level of devices as indivisible, at least for this class of project. LEGO could make (arguably, does make, through Mindstorms) an injection-molded-polymer Spot knockoff, but the sort of people who want to build a LEGO kit aren't trying to put together a Spot variant. Even a lot of the Pi-and-cheap-servo posebots are largely marketed under the theory that they're an introduction to everything you'd need to learn for the project.
Some of this is just inevitable Pareto Principle stuff, but I think a lot of it's downstream of the death of manufacturing. The emphasis and ease-of-access to bits makes it so easy to considering scaling and production as someone else's problem, because, for no small part, it has been. I think the extreme time constraints and very limited purchaser base have done more to keep the FIRST ecosystem around as long as it has.
There's a few interesting takes on custom motors like the DizzyMotors, but almost all have a step one that involves taking apart a larger, expensive motor. Moteus is getting closer, but it's still (AFAIK) still in a prototype level, and it's very far from anything especially hitting the limits of the medium.
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