But all of that has maintenance overhead, and whether hover or translational flight dominate the energy consumption determines which to optimize… there’s no gre

But all of that has maintenance overhead, and whether hover or translational flight dominate the energy consumption determines which to optimize… there’s no great efficiency loss to going fixed pitch unless these two flight regimes have near equal average energy usage per flight. Additionally: Variable pitch is one thing, but swashplate flight is another. There’s no significant efficiency reason to change blade pitch multiple times per second. Much slower variable pitch propellers, aka on horizontal flight aircraft, is much lower maintenance and overall complexity than a swashplate based helicopter.