Sure, let's instead encourage them to reinvent the wheel (TF, simulation, architecture, navigation, localization, SLAM, 2D map representation, etc.) that seems much smarter. ROS might be like democracy ("the worst form of government except for all the others we've tried"), but it's still the only stake in the ground around which we've manage to corral a community.

For this question specifically: there are many ways to approach robotics, incl. from the hardware side. But approaching it from the software (sim) side is not invalid, so I don't think down-voting my comment was warranted.