Something that we need to recognize is the psycho-cultural differences of companies that are not based in the west. In some ways, those of us in the US, dealing with companies here expect a different, more consumer centered approach to things. The approach to business in Asian countries is entirely different and their policies often do not make sense to the westerner.
Let's be honest, with limited exceptions, there is DJI, followed by a host of cheap Chinese wanabe drones. And for the most part DJI knows they're pretty much the only game in town for the serious enthusiast and entry level commercial pilot.... at least for now.
I don't think DJI have in any way sat on their laurels or offered a non-consumer focused approach (aside from atrocious support but that's most certainly not limited to Asian companies), they've had little actual competition for years and could easily have taken advantage of that to deliberately stagnate the technology or cripple older devices but they haven't unlike western companies like Intel, Nvidia and Apple who have done either or both over the last few years . They've continually improved their drones and the
Mavic 2 series is probably one of the best examples of that since the original Mavic Pro had decimated the Karma, its only real rival yet rather than just keep going with that design they pushed on to offer the M2 series with a physical zoom or a 1in sensor. Even two years later there's not much in the way of competition readily available for sale here in the UK.
The complaints the OP makes are nothing to do with business strategy and everything to do with the hardware and technology. The
Mavic 2 Pro isn't a general purpose system like PCs are and uses more customised hardware to achieve high performance and which maintaining high power efficiency which is crucial to a device like a drone. As someone pointed out early to gain better obstacle avoidance performance the
Mavic 2 Pro would need additional sensors and it would likely need additional internal hardware to rapidly process that information to allow the drone the ability to move faster to deal with the obstacles better. The
Mavic Air 2 which I'm assuming is the cheaper model the OP refers to uses a newer stacked sensor design and takes advantage of a much faster readout while the
Mavic 2 Pro uses an older BSI design. From memory Sony actually introduced the stacked sensor technology with in sensors in the RX100Mk4 and the RX10mk2 but I don't believe Sony sell this sensor and only use it for their own devices (same as the incredible FF version found in the A9 series) so DJI couldn't add those features to the
M2P.
Another point to bear in mind is that the drone market is a long way from fully saturated so dji are not reliant on selling new drones to existing drone owners as they have plenty of new potential customers. The mobile phone market on the other hand is very heavily saturated so manufacturers have to try and get existing phone owners to regularly upgrade. If the
Mavic 2 series could have a major upgrade through software it would like make a lot of sense financially to dji since they'd be able to extend the lifetime of the drone bringing in new buyers without having all the costs of a new new drone.
I'm not claiming dji are perfect but I think it's wrong to claim that they they're are not improving products and it's part of an Asian business approach. I'm impressed how much they have advanced drones despite the little competition especially coming from an IT background where the desktop cpu market was pretty much dead for a long time due to Intel having no competition until amd's new Ryzen series turned the market upside down. I desperately hope they can do the same to the graphics card market which Nvidia have had to themselves for far too long leaving us with hugely expensive cards with disappointing performance improvements.