Speaking as someone with a good view on aerospace code, I think the issue is that the difficulty of combining the kind of code required for remote control of an aircraft with the kind of regulation, failsafes and standards of commercial airliner code is what is holding us back.
Writing UAS software is hard. Only operating UAS in warzones helps with the overheads for this. Effectively "drone-ifying" a commercial airliner is a complete nightmare which would probably require government assistance to implement in the form of cutting of red tape or funding the handling of existing red tape.
Writing UAS software is hard. Only operating UAS in warzones helps with the overheads for this. Effectively "drone-ifying" a commercial airliner is a complete nightmare which would probably require government assistance to implement in the form of cutting of red tape or funding the handling of existing red tape.