I want to use something Valetudo to keep my local system supportable and maintainable, but I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars trying to figure out which robot vacuum might have just the right firmware revision that I can dismantle and flash it so it'll work.

Given the cost of getting it wrong, buying a preflashed "definitely works" unit is of considerable value to me.

If the author of Valetudo wanted to license a run of vacuums from a manufacturer that definitely worked, I would buy that. If someone else goes into business managing the buying and flashing part with some sort of support, that's also valuable to me.

If this market segment is currently unserved (seems to be) then I'll become a customer of whoever starts serving it, because that has value to me. Ideally, that would also include kicking back funding to ensure good support from the Valetudo platform (which tends to be how these things work).

Though also frankly the idea that managing the logistics and supply of a product pipeline is "easy" is...well, why hardware is hard has been covered extensively before.

It's perfectly fine to make a business implementing, installing, or supporting FOSS software. I would even consider that a positive thing. Even if you don't (or can't!) help the upstream development.