Sure, but fixed wing drones are even easier to build, fly and (modulo the landing bits) land than quads. Even independent small shops are designing and shipping

Sure, but fixed wing drones are even easier to build, fly and (modulo the landing bits) land than quads. Even independent small shops are designing and shipping recreational performance fixed wing drones reusing drone parts (BlackSheep's Caipirinha 2 comes to mind: https://team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_caipi2_kit https://team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_caipi2_kit). Quads just have the ability to hover, which is desirable in a lot of industrial applications. They're also a nice example here because they have the most expensive avionics software and hardware (clock speeds have hard minimums) and THEY are cheap.