AWE is not at all special in that any reasonably difficult technology needs some time and money to develop.
Enabling technologies also need to be in place. I’ll take a guess and say it’s only been a few years (if the time has come at all) since it has been possible to even begin trying to get a kite to fly itself and react in real-time to sensor inputs. The teams are also typically small so progress is also typically slow. I’m guessing the companies are often people and resources constrained, so what might take a big engineering department 2 years to develop might take these companies 7 years or longer.
As multiple architectures have shown, it is possible to extract energy from the wind using tethered devices. So if R&D continues and the companies are run competently and keep existing, something should eventually come out of it. The idea is to replace concrete and steel with software and software is cheaper than steel in the long run after all.
It could be that still some enabling technologies are not ready, or that architectures have critical design flaws that prevent them even getting to market. That is a more interesting and useful question. That would require a deep technical analysis of the specific architecture chosen by a company though. I don’t think I have seen any such analysis on here. It’s also reasonably difficult to do without doing corporate espionage.
Anyway, disruptive innovation takes time. Link drop: Disruptive Innovation We’ve gone over this before.