This is so laughably wrong it's not even funny. We're not talking about individual lens elements but entire camera lenses. There's a ton of engineering that go

This is so laughably wrong it's not even funny. We're not talking about individual lens elements but entire camera lenses. There's a ton of engineering that goes into designing eg; a zoom lens that can cover a focal range while retaining sharpness, minimal color fringing, etc. And that's assuming you can use software to correct for distortion... in the past that was a dealbreaker. The result is a lens that requires 10-20 (or sometimes even more) individual elements. No matter how you cut it that will be expensive. There's no cheating physics sadly.