Comparing AWE hardware with Conventional Wind hardware is a fallacy. Conventional hardware sits on a pole and does not even access the same wind resource as AWE intends. Upper wind is a spatially and qualitatively (more dense) different resource only accessed by aviation. Aviation hardware is not really "replaced by software".

Complex "energy drone" flight automation dependent on digital computation, sensing, and actuation cannot possibly maximize Power-to-Mass. It is a dead-end, comparatively.

Digital controls are best suited to surface-based supervisory functions, to enhance inherent passive dynamic stabilities of vast "rag & string" kite networks, for multi-GW scale AWES, that will be professionally piloted, by law.

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TUD does not "waste time" losing AWE engineering debate.

Roland:    "The essence of airborne wind energy is to replace material constraints (passive) by control algorithms (active). This is the great potential but at the same time also the challenge of the technology."   Source     Then Roand added recently in Windy's forum: "I did not mean that all hardware can be replaced by software. This guiding idea is about replacing a substantial fraction of hardware by software. I think that this is the potential of AWES."

"The essence of airborne wind energy is to replace (passive) material constraints by (active) control algorithms. This is the great potential but at the same time also the challenge of the technology." ~ Roland Schmehl      See how this claim is contested in the above notes.