Thread Drift? Not quite! I love these old "innovation stifled" stories! They always turn out to be rather far from the truth. If we take the "innovation stifled" thing to its logical conclusion "robot technology", etc., is supposed to drive the cost of everything to zero and produce marvellous things like engines that run on water (suppressed by the oil companies) and now cheap Cessna 172s.
Now about Bishop. My memory tells me that Bishop made their money by making a major innovation in automotive power steering technology that was taken up by all the worlds car manufacturers forthwith. However they may have then made the somewhat rash decision to keep innovating.
Mr. Onetrack, innovation is very, very expensive and highly risky. It mostly fails. This is why smart managers don't do it. If they are smart, they copy other peoples innovations and save their money. They only innovate as a last resort ( I can substantiate this but I'll save it for my doctorate).
So yes, robot produced cheap Cessnas with multi valve petrol EFI engines are being suppressed by Lycoming and Teledyne in a conspiracy to make flying expensive??? The truth is more prosaic.
The Bishop rotary valve was a solution looking for a problem - and it found one - an F1 engine turning at 18,000 rpm! It had little relevance to current automotive technology, which anyway appears to be going electric, it would be at least ten years from actual production and delivers no performance increase apart from perhaps reduced weight and possibly complexity (or not). And that is without taking into account the designers little devil NVH (noise, vibration and harshness). For all we know, a Bishop engine might sound like chalk screeching on a blackboard, which renders it useless.
So did the evil FIA squelch another innovation by a little Aussie battler? I don't think so. Same reason they squashed gas turbines, no relevance to todays automotive problems. Furthermore, if you think FIA isn't innovative, look at the regenerative braking systems on F1 cars.
As for aircraft and robots, my aircraft kit and the Mahindra/Gippsland GA 8 have one thing in common - their sheet metal is CNC cut and drilled to the point where the parts are interchangeable, which is more than can be said for the FA-18 and a whole lot of Boeing products which still have pilot holes on corners and require you to match drill everything.
As for robotic assembly, you need to redesign the aircraft for that and then recertify it as a new product, in any case since when is the American labour cost in assembling a Cessna going to the deciding factor in aircraft cost??
However I like innovation stories, but they don't usually have a happy ending - didn't Rotax announce they were building a multi valve, fuel injected V6 300 HP engine to take on Lycoming and Continental? Remember how that panned out? The Thielert diesels on the Diamonds? Lycoming is going to be around for a while longer.