Agreed! I think there’s also genuine uncertainty about what uses will be popular, much like the early Apple Watch iterations involved some amount of flailing to figure out what works.
The spare-no-expense approach can be seen as an effort to not close off avenues of exploration before they know what works. When optimizing for cost, decisions will be made to save money at the expense of ruling out some potential appeal, but right now nobody knows what will have appeal. The EyeSight feature seems like a prime example of something that very few would include in a product today because the appeal is uncertain while the cost is high. It might turn out to be a home run of a feature, and this luxury version of the Apple Vision product is how they can gain experience with it. If the response is instead that it looks like googly eyes, makes people uncomfortable, or doesn’t achieve the goal of letting people use Vision while in the presence of others, then maybe it would find itself on the chopping block to get costs down.
The Vision product is a more like a monitor than AR glasses you wear all day. It makes nods to the practicality of strapping a monitor to your face: you can unplug, slide the battery in your pocket, stand up and walk into a different room to get something without disengaging from the monitor. If someone wants to chat, you can fade in reality and let them see your eyes so that the two of you can more comfortably (we’ll see about this!) exchange a few words.
Without things like that, strapping a monitor to your face to get great eye tracking, immersive photos/video, and the giant digital canvas for your application windows might prove too inconvenient. For example, needing to pull the goggles off to answer a quick question from someone else in the room could make the whole endeavor not worth the hassle in some settings. If those settings turn out to be popular (e.g. using this at work in an office), then Apple is one step ahead.
I think that AR glasses you wear when out and about will be a different product. Admittedly, the photography aspect of Vision is a tentative move in this direction. I think it’s being positioned more as a thing where you’d pull it out to capture a particular scene, then put it away again, rather than something you’d wear for an entire outing (the battery life largely precludes such a use, after all). I don’t think it’s a great fit for this now as it seems like it’d require the equivalent of a camera bag to bring with you, but undoubtedly some people will capture some amazing images.