It seems there are many people coming on board with RAE … not all have a background from the previous Luxonis devices and cameras … let alone the Luxonis APIs.
Typically there would be expectations to be able to move RAE via simple python code, to stream camera feeds, reading image frames … all from python code … this would open up "programming" RAE to a lot of people. Not everyone here is wanting leading edge AI vision on day one … rather expecting to start small and grow into it. Even ROS is a major jump for some.
Running local is another benefit. Not everyone wants 24/7 cloud connections just to run RAE.