The FAA and EASA certification is based on known entities and if you bring something new to the market that hasn't been proven, however trivial, they will bury you under certification requests.
That's not a problem if you are a big company with full time people doing this stuff. They know how to tick the boxes.
Very hard for a startup with no expertise (I have looked into this and even a PMA is a lot of hassle).
This favors not only big players with big pockets who have less inclination to renew as they have vested interest likely already in the marketplace.
Of course, but that is "business".
That is what business is about. Your objective is to put yourself in a position where competitors face large barriers to entry. You can do this by a lot of R&D spending resulting in a heavy rate of innovation (hardly the case in GA
), by patenting every stupid thing you do, by using various (often illegal) techniques to maintain dealer/reseller loyalty, and by other legal and illegal methods.
The certification process supports this, but not really intentionally. I think EASA (which is basically a load of gravy train riders) does support Part 21 firms actively, however, by refusing to accept FAA AML STCs and more generally in other ways.