The Wingtra in the article is a VTOL fixed wing, not as easy to do as a quad.
The other main drone from Switzerland is senseFly's eBee, again a fixed-wing mostly for photogrammetry.
The drone in a cage they talk about is I think flyability's.
All of those are drones for professional applications, not for hobbyists.
That market is pretty much cornered: wants nice videos/pictures -> DJI, a racing quad or just to pilot -> go custom/cheap Chinese.
In all of those cases, the value is either in software/product behind the drone where the hardware is just a platform, or something quite custom for a specific application.
As you said, you can't compete with the Chinese for generic hardware, as Intel, Parrot and others discovered.
Sure, but fixed wing drones are even easier to build, fly and (modulo the landing bits) land than quads. Even independent small shops are designing and shipping recreational performance fixed wing drones reusing drone parts (BlackSheep's Caipirinha 2 comes to mind: https://team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_caipi2_kit).
Quads just have the ability to hover, which is desirable in a lot of industrial applications. They're also a nice example here because they have the most expensive avionics software and hardware (clock speeds have hard minimums) and THEY are cheap.
All of those are drones for professional applications, not for hobbyists. That market is pretty much cornered: wants nice videos/pictures -> DJI, a racing quad or just to pilot -> go custom/cheap Chinese.
In all of those cases, the value is either in software/product behind the drone where the hardware is just a platform, or something quite custom for a specific application. As you said, you can't compete with the Chinese for generic hardware, as Intel, Parrot and others discovered.