No, I don't work on them but I wish I did!
You've given a lot of reasons why they might not get a free ride in the UK, but not all countries work to the same standards: doubtless this will be the reason the first 'serious' drone services operate in rural Africa. I don't know how smoothly they're going, but some of the newspaper articles talk about 150 flights a day. If they can be developed to the point where they're safe there, then ultimately they will arrive here. But at least some Western countries are likely to allow them be to be developed on home soil: they'll simply be too big a business to be left to be abandoned to other countries to develop.