Completely agree with your assessments.
What I’m trying to do is demonstrate that photography has a very wide range in equipment costs, and the drone photography, at least at this forum’s end of the scale, is fairly economical for what we obtain from it.
Photography is much less expensive than it used to be due to digital technology. In today’s would we get to shoot a picture that stores on an SD card that is used over and over, we review the image within seconds, elect to keep or retain it, and sit down at a computer loaded with programs to further refine an image.
In the old days everything was shot on film of various types that could be used just once, that had to be processed as negatives, slides, or prints before viewing them. Undesirable shots had to be weeded out after expensive initial processing, and any further enhancements was a laborious process. After all that prints required enlargement and transfer to photo paper. Any serious photographer could go through $300-$1,000 in a month of shooting.