FPV is dead.
We assert, that as of 2021, FPV and UAS is dead. Let's explain.
First, for anyone who's panties bundled up we still love and practice FPV/UAS. There are a few things driving this opinion.
TLDR; "Innovation is predictable and not revolutionary".
As a practitioners since 2013, each year felt like Moore's law on crystal meth. Trends came and went in months. Entire build trends often led to a dead end street named "Burning Money Dr".
For a while the fundamental capabilities at least doubled every year. Since about 2018 this has been slowing down. Current obsession dwells on miniaturization, decreasing power consumption, and format. We welcome all of this progress.
In the same breath my KISS (Fettec) flight controller is so fucking good there is no need to tune. Except for rates of course. Adjusting the PIDs comes later, if at all. All this while a bird moves between 120 grams and 300 grams. Prop size can vary form 1.5" to 6". A lot of variation, still the flights are all great! A 6" flies as if floating, a 2" prop feels like a bumblebee with performance upgrades.
The two big blockers are reliability and flight time. Rapid manufacturing and a race to the bottom pollutes UAS and in particular FPV. Battery tech is a slow crawl, little change, no revolution, incremental.
Oh, the third blocker is the FAA. They hate drones, the reason we created the Fun Hog Frame: A sub-250 gram full experience FPV drone platform that is field repairable and highly performant.
We welcome advancement, but the market has cooled off a lot. Drones are just a part of culture and not the game changer predicted in 2012. The FAA still hates drones. The media created a boogie-man, again, luckily there are newer, bigger, badder boogiemen.
We expect stagnation to continue for some time but stand ready for change!