Even commodity manufacturing is its own art because you have to make millions of something per day instead of tens of thousands. You have to take material in one side of the factory and spit it out the other as fast as you can. You've crossed the limits of being able to warehouse half completed bits because machine #17 has gone on the fritz again and nobody can finish product.

So I need more reliable equipment and then I still need to make them at a lower price than the luxury model I'm copying.

I don't think anyone who has entirely avoided skilled manual labor in their lives quite comprehends how big a difference there is being able to do something well, and being able to do it at scale. It's almost not the same problem domain.

That descrption of mass manufacturing reminds me of building reliable computing systems from unreliable parts (server farm(s)), something I have never done, only read about. It is apparently very different from regular software development in similar ways.